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It was very plain and bare, with none of the little toilette elegances or chamber comforts that women usually love. Conny never spent except where it showed saliently. Her evening gowns were sometimes almost splendid, but her dressing gowns were dowdy, and poor little Bessie Falkner spent twice as much on lingerie.
The incident is the success of the day, and is obviously intended to have some kind of reflex action in amusing the reader. In Dickens's maturer books the burlesque little girl imitates her mother's illusory fainting- fits. Our glimpses of children in the fugitive pages of that day are grotesque. A little girl in Punch improves on the talk of her dowdy mother with the maids.
She had hoped to find her dowdy or unenlightened, and to be able to look down on her from the heights of her own New York experience.
They were on their way to Wurzburg, and at the first station, which was a junction, a lady mounted to their compartment just before the train began to move. She was stout and middle-aged, and had never been pretty, but she bore herself with a kind of authority in spite of her thread gloves, her dowdy gray travelling-dress, and a hat of lower middle-class English tastelessness.
Even at an Ermetyne dinner she couldn't actually look dowdy in it. And then, accompanied by Gaya, who had turned out to be a very pleasant but not very communicative companion, she'd headed for a gambling room to make back the price of the gown. It hadn't worked out. The game she'd particularly studied up on turned out to have a five hundred minimum play. Which finished that scheme.
Elizabeth drew back hastily, and Harriet relinquished it; conscious perhaps, that however thin the arm might look, her own broad ruddy hand would hardly bear a comparison with Elizabeth's long slender white fingers, and returned to the subject of the hair, shaking her profusion of ringlets. 'And straight hair is all the fashion now, but I think it gives a terrible dowdy look.
She no longer looked dowdy when entering a room, but very much the reverse; and the little Florentine world began to recognise that they had got something very much like a new Corinne among them. But of course I rarely got a chance of monopolising her as I had done during that first afternoon. We were however constantly meeting, and were becoming ever more and more close friends.
The doctor's professional interest in this matter decided him on trying for the prize and the result is our return to the hateful old town and its society. "Of course, my husband resumes his professional studies; of course, I am thrown once more among the dowdy gossiping women. But that is far from being the worst of it.
In reality, he was going to see one of his Conservatoire friends, a large, lanky dowdy, as swarthy as a mole and full of pretensions, who was destined for the tragic line of character, and inflicted upon her lover Athalie's dream, Camille's imprecations, and Phedre's monologue.
It might be, as she insisted, that she was not dressed properly for fashionable dining; but there would be no more delicate, no more lady-like loveliness. He quite recovered his nerve when they faced the company that had terrified him in prospect. He saw many commonplace looking people, not a few who were downright dowdy.
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