The Sleeping Beauty by Elizabeth Taylor

long looking-glass. The insides of the sleeves felt smooth and new.
    ‘How many months of the year, though, can we take the advantage of a summer coat?’
    ‘Well, I shall wear it this evening.’
    ‘It’s hardly weather for a pale colour. Far better save it for a nice day. A real scorcher you need for that shade.’
    But saving clothes half wasted them. To get their true magic one must snatch them at once from their box, shake tissue-paper all over the floor, put them on and go out. Anywhere, to be seen. Her mother called it ‘hacking things on the minute you get them’.
    ‘Well, you look nice,’ Nannie said kindly. ‘I only thought it was different to what you’d set your mind on. I wondered whatever made you turn to that shade. You’ve got a nice choice, though; I’ll say that.’
    She gathered up all the discarded paper and Betty ran to herroom where her stockings steamed in front of the gas-fire. She put them on carefully and they steamed on her legs for a few minutes more. She thought that the dangers of damp clothes were easily overemphasised. Nannie made her hold the children’s vests to a looking-glass, searching for the faintest film; but she never did when she was on her own.
    She tied a silk scarf over her hair and gave her reflection an odd look or two. Her eyebrows lifted; her nostrils dilated. ‘I beg
yours
!’ she seemed to be saying. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure.’ ‘I certainly am
not
going your way.’
    ‘To be out of uniform! To be out!’ she thought, as she ran downstairs.
    Laurence arrived unexpectedly and the house was empty. Isabella was still at the Turkish baths. The fire was laid, but not lit. The evening paper was on the doormat. He took it into the kitchen, spread it out on the table and carefully worked out his day’s winnings, which came to two and threepence. Then he made himself a cup of tea; but he really liked Army tea, orange-coloured, with condensed milk if possible. The empty house made him feel restless, and after a while, he wrote a note to his mother and went out.
    The shops were beginning to close. He did not often look into shop-windows; but now he examined them carefully for want of much else to do. Rhubarb on bright blue paper, pork-pies cut in halves to show the pink, marbled meat and grey jelly, piles of black-puddings, faggots, all suggested a cosy domesticity which he missed at Aldershot, where no one went out to choose and buy the food they ate. The florist’s disturbed him – the cool, scented interior. He breathed deeply, standing by the open door and looking in at the pots of ferns on the damp wooden floor and then at a green-and-brown orchid with a hanging jaw. He would have liked to buy some flowers for hismother – even the orchid – and his hand touched his money in his pocket; but then he did not know how he would ever give it to her, and feared lest she should be too pleased, so that he would be made guilty and embarrassed. He wandered on.
    At the end of the street, where the gardens were, he could see trees with pale pink blossom, and this he thought very pleasant after all the chestnuts and the raspberry-coloured May at Aldershot. He was not unhappy there; but he never again cared for chestnut-trees; just as, although he had not been unhappy at school, Lombardy poplars, which had bordered the playing-fields there, now had a discouraging effect upon him.
    The lovely violet light over the town, flowing down the streets, stirred him; even – for he was a guarded and cautious youth – excited him. A weekend at Portsmouth, with his best friend, Len, had begun the unsettling. Len’s mother had constantly talked of what she called ‘Len’s young lady’. The young lady had come to tea on Sunday. She sat on the arm of Len’s chair and kept slapping his wrist. They were the centre of attraction and much indulged. Laurence had envied Len the lordly way in which he sprawled in his chair, grinning, fondling the girl, being waited on