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To-day, in this state, we find ninety-nine women out of every one hundred wearing flowers, and laces, and plush and satin on their hats, instead of the heads, bodies and feathers of wild birds that were the regular thing until three years ago. The change has been a powerful commentary on the value of good laws for the protection of wild life.
At first sight she passed for a woman of hard and forbidding aspect; filmy laces and a clinging kimona of rose-pink silk neither softened nor made feminine the alabaster-colored face with its thin, straight mouth, heavy hairy eyebrows, and clean-cut Greek nose. Only her costume and her hair, indescribably fine, and indescribably yellow, betrayed that there were follies in her nature.
Good gracious! it would seem like throwing away money, though, to dress up that little dingy thing in pearls and laces. Ten to one but what she will marry that lame imp next door as soon as she is grown, and endow him with the whole of it that 'little devil on two sticks, and I must have my run before then, of course." She laughed merrily at the conceit.
"Come, Mahaly," said a fresh-looking young-fellow with a saucerful in each hand, "here's your ice-cream; let's go in the corner and have a celebration, us two." And the old green de-lame, with the young curves under it to make it sit well, moved off as pleased apparently as if it had been silk velvet with thousand-dollar laces over it.
Etheldreda, and at this fair a famous "fairing" was "St. Audrey's laces." St. Audrey, or Etheldreda, in the days of her youthful vanity was very fond of wearing necklaces and jewels. "St. Audrey's laces" became corrupted into "Tawdry laces"; hence the adjective has come to be applied to all cheap and showy pieces of female ornament. Trade now finds its way by means of other channels than fairs.
It meant nothing to her that in her case she must first prepare the breakfast. Promptly appeared in the house a yard of dotted Swiss muslin, and Saxon was deep in experimenting on patterns for herself, and in sorting her bits of laces for suitable trimmings. The resultant dainty creation won Mercedes Higgins' enthusiastic approval.
If some new-comer thought Mademoiselle Evangelista bewitching and said to a marriageable man that he couldn't do it better, "Who would be bold enough," some woman would reply, "to marry a girl whose mother gives her a thousand francs a month for her toilet, a girl who has horses and a maid of her own, and wears laces? Yes, her 'peignoirs' are trimmed with mechlin.
A brooch in the laces at her throat shone with a thousand hues, and as Ellen gazed at it she felt curiously dull and dizzy. She did not resist at all when the lady removed her little white shawl, but stared at her with the look of some small and helpless thing in too large a grasp of destiny to admit of a struggle. "Oh, you darling!"
Grandmother Sandal's awmries were opened for old laces and fine cambric, and petticoats and spencers of silks wonderful in quality and color, and guiltless of any admixture of less precious material. There were whole sets of many garments to make, and tucking and frilling and stitching were then slow processes.
As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before the social mendicant, the white billows of her beauty heaving under the foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them, I should have wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness and vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.
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