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"O-o-h!" she breathed softly. "Don't tell me what's in them. I want to believe in brocades and sashes. Do you know," she looked at him soberly, "I never had any dark places behind the tank, nor mysterious trunks, when I was a child." "You might begin now," suggested Orde. "Do you mean to insinuate I haven't grown up?" she mocked. "Thank you!
Mercers awaited upon her at her house, accompanied by their attendants, bearing burdens of brocades and silks, and splendid stuffs of all sorts. Her chariot was to be seen standing before their shops, and the interest in her purchases was so great that fashionable beauties would contrive to visit the counters at the same hours as herself, so that they might catch glimpses of what she chose.
The materials used for upholstery were brocades of large pattern, tapestries, and splendid velvets. There is great danger, in buying furniture for both this period and the Renaissance, that the reproductions chosen may be too florid, the gilding too bright, the carving too ornate, with an indescribable vulgarity of line in place of the beauty of line which the best originals have.
"Yesterday Signor Lodovico sent me, with the Duchess of Milan and Bari, to look at some sumptuous brocades which he had seen in the house of one of the richest merchants here. When we came home, he asked me which I considered the finest.
That gentleman, in his gray cloth, with some fine Mechlin lace at throat and wrists, and wearing only his order of the Cincinnati, overtopped all the other ambassadors in stately bearing, and looked more noble than did most of the marquises and counts and dukes in their brocades and powdered perukes and glittering decorations or, at least, so thought Calvert, who was himself very good to look at in his white broadcloth and flowered satin waistcoat.
Merchants arriving at the different Indian ports would often find that their own countrymen had been too quick for them, and that other fleets had got the wind out of their sails, that the eastern markets had been stripped, and that prices had gone up to a ruinous height, while on the other hand, in the Dutch cities, nutmegs and cinnamon, brocades and indigo, were as plentiful as red herrings.
It is impossible to describe how the Empress heaped Lady Ma with costly jewels and silken brocades and taels of silver beyond measuring how she placed on her breast the amulet of jade that had guarded herself from all evil influences, how she called the ancestral spirits to witness that she would provide for the Lady Ma's remotest descendants if she lost her life in this sublime devotion to duty.
I have had and have seen others have, in the old days, really gorgeous brocades made by cutting out great bunches of flowers from chintz and applying them to a cheaper background, and then picking out the high lights with embroidery silk, the effect being not only beautiful, but rich. All these make-believes were necessary then, on a $30 or $35 a week salary, for a leading lady drew no more.
The door was already open, the rattle of wheels having brought lackeys with lighted torches to welcome the belated travelers. Torches flamed in the cressets on both sides of the entrance. The hall was filled with servants and members of the household, and in the bustle that ensued when the ladies in their brocades and hoops had entered the house, Desmond saw an opportunity of slipping away.
A pearl or diamond necklace or a blushing bouquet excuses the liberal allowance of undisguised nature. We expect from the fine lady in her brocades and laces a generosity of display which we should reprimand with the virtuous severity of Tartuffe if ventured upon by the waiting-maid in her calicoes.
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