A Garden of Virtues

It is indeed possible. I am enjoying my peach latte while browsing Victoria magazine's web site. I feel so spoiled having this magazine back into publication. When I renewed my subscription today I also bought a subscription to Tea Time magazine. In addition I am downloading beautiful antique plates to print and have just purchased Enchanted April to re-read on my EReader. I have been thinking of it and missing it lately. Perhaps it will take me back to those summer days before life became so complicated, when I was fifteen and looking out over Elkins Lake as I read this book by the pool.

Rebodied, rewigged Caroline is trying lolita fashion. I think she makes a very unusual lolita. I love her pallor. She reminds me of fashion plates from the 1840s.

Fastened in the frame of her gilt dressing mirror, an aging corsage, a shriveled carnation fragile as paper and gray with dust bound in tulle and frayed ribbons. Hand in gloved hand on a garden walk in moonlight, air redolent with the scent of lilies A heady, waxy, funereal perfume, it was all known for the first time. Filmy stockings and heavy canvas girdle flung over the back of her dressing table chair, a hasty and disordered undressing, somehow there's no longer time to hang the clothing properly. She glares at her reflection over a green stoneware cup of strong coffee. She lifts her well-loved tube of coral-orange lipstick to the light, a profound fallacy against her ruddy, sleepless skin and worried pallor. A candle is burning down to the quick. At night by flickering light she writes letters to the same people who have replaced themselves completely in ten years. "We are all strangers. Pierre, even you."