This somewhat rude and almost masculine frankness she softened, as soon as she began to smile, with an Italian languor. And the whole person was clothed in a dress so typically ‘Second Empire’ that — for all that the Princess wore it simply and solely, no doubt, from attachment to the fashions that she had loved when she was young — she seemed to have deliberately planned to avoid the slightest discrepancy in historic colour, and to be satisfying the expectations of those who looked to her to evoke the memory of another age.
