Flint and Roses by Brenda Jagger Page B

one in Venice would ever believe you to be my daughter. A sister, perhaps, for you have my eye and hair colour—which is something very much out of the ordinary in Venice. I do assure you. And yes—in other ways too, dear—I believe you are turning but to resemble me.’
    â€˜Hardly, mamma. I am inches taller, and my nose is much too big.’
    â€˜Yes, but such details, you know, do not really signify. A clever woman learns how to create an illusion.’
    â€˜Father said I was the one most like you’, Celia cut in tossing her head to set her ringlets dancing, determined for once in her life to win her fair share of attention.
    â€˜Yes, dear,’ my mother said absently, not even glancing at her. ‘You are a positive enchantment. And Prudence—Good heavens!—you remind me of someone I have not seen for ages—a relative of your father’s.’
    â€˜She means you remind her of our brother,’ Celia said later, imparting the information because, our brother having been sent away in disgrace, she could not believe it to be a compliment. But my mother, whose understanding was sharper than one at first supposed soon made amends to Celia by smothering her in all the lace and ribbons she could desire, and to Prudence by paying her the compliment of leaving her alone, while she and I soon formed a relationship which hung tenuously but pleasantly on our shared enthusiasm for fashion.
    â€˜One must develop a style,’ she told me. ‘One chooses not to copy, but to be copied—a dear friend in Paris told me that, although I had always suspected it and behaved accordingly. You are tall and so, since you cannot shrink, you must make yourself look taller—simple, classical lines, bold colours or plain white, and no fuss, and a bonnet. I think, when you are a little older, with a positively towering feather. What fun! I was never allowed to dress you up when you were small. There was always a Miss Mayfield to do that. And as for your nose, dear, and the fact that your mouth is rather wide, you must cultivate an air of feeling so sorry for all these poor girls who are cursed with rosebud lips and button noses and dimples. If you appear to like what you have, dear, even if they don’t quite like it themselves, at the very least it will make them wonder.’
    For Caroline’s birthday dance my sister Celia had a dress of palest pink gauze, its flounced skirt strewn with knots of silver ribbon and sprays of pink and white flowers; Prudence a more restrained outfit of pale blue, which, with its touches of cream-coloured lace and her tall, straight figure, gave her a quiet but most decided elegance. My dress was white, a swan, I’d thought dreamily, as our seamstress had pinned the vast skirt into place—‘Too plain,’ Celia had told me—a white flower at the waist another at the shoulder—‘White is for brunettes.’ Celia had said, ‘everybody knows that’—my hair dressed low on the nape of my neck in one massive coil with a single white rose at its centre, a chignon devised by my mother to look so heavy that anyone who noticed it would be aware that my neck was long and slender, and might miss the fact that my, nose and mouth were of a corresponding size. I had pearl droplets in my ears, a broad velvet ribbon embroidered with pearl clusters around my throat, a pair of wide-spaced, worried, short-sighted blue eyes above it, since I was by no means as confident of this unusual outfit as I pretended feeling in fact as the time of our departure grew imminent that, although these classical lines and colours might be all the rage in Venice. Cullingford was far too accustomed to seeing its young ladies in sugar-pink gauzes and ribbons—like Celia—to be anything other than puzzled.
    My mother, who should not have attended a dance at all until her mourning period was over, or, if she managed to justify it on the grounds