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When she emerged from thence, her fringe artistically curled, her face becomingly tinged with pearl-powder, her dress and appointments all combining to give her small person importance, and show a due regard to the exigencies of fashion, she found the couch which the mysterious stranger had occupied was vacant.
The chambermaid pointed with her wicked forefinger in the direction of the glass. "Bear in mind, ma'am, what you looked like when you sent for me," she said. "And just see for yourself how you look now. Ah what a thing pearl-powder is, when one knows how to use it!" I FIND it impossible to describe my sensations while the carriage was taking me to Major Fitz-David's house.
Oh, my reader! may you never behold such a sight as that which presented itself: eighty-three men and women in ball-dresses; the former with their lank powdered locks streaming over their faces; the latter with faded flowers, uncurled wigs, smudged rouge, blear eyes, draggling feathers, rumpled satins each more desperately melancholy and hideous than the other each, except my beloved Belinda Bulcher, whose raven ringlets never having been in curl, could of course never go OUT of curl; whose cheek, pale as the lily, could, as it may naturally be supposed, grow no paler; whose neck and beauteous arms, dazzling as alabaster, needed no pearl-powder, and therefore, as I need not state, did not suffer because the pearl-powder had come off.
The book just fits in a little japanned box that belonged to my grandmother, in which she used to keep rouge and pearl-powder. I will keep it in that, and remember my promise to Madge. "February 21. The journey is over, and I am at Cousin Eleanor's. How the evils that we dread shrink into nothing when we fairly meet them!
Diane stood before him, in a costume that would have better suited a court presentation; the shaded gas-lamps softened the rouge and pearl-powder on her cheeks, and lent her a beauty that could never have survived the test of daylight. Her expression was one of half defiance, half mute entreaty. The audacity of the woman staggered Jack, and for an instant he was speechless with indignation.
Perfect womanhood at fair eighteen: let that fill all the picture up with soft and swelling charms; no wadding, or padding, or jigot, or jupe but all those graceful undulations are herself: no pearl-powder, no carmine, no borrowed locks, no musk, or ambergris but all those feeble helps of meretricious art excelled and superseded by their just originals in nature.
For my part, I admired her more than I ever did before, when the truth about her came out. I considered her to be a pink-and-white nonentity, without an idea beyond a neat adjustment of pearl-powder, and then found that she possessed brains enough to outwit two minds of no mean calibre, namely, yours, Middleton, and my own.
Resplendent with pearl-powder and with cosmetics, she sat in there, stately and majestic, with a small brass poker in her hands, with which she was stirring the ashes of the hand-stove. P'ing Erh stood by the side of the couch, holding a very small lacquered tea-tray. In this tray was a small tea-cup with a cover.
By the aid of these, of pearl-powder, of rouge, of false hair, false teeth, and false tournure, as well as of the most skilful modistes of Paris, she contrived to hold a respectable footing among the beauties en peu passees of the French metropolis. In this respect, indeed, she might have been regarded as little less than the equal of the celebrated Ninon De L'Enclos.
She had arrayed herself in a trailing gown of rich black velvet, fastened at the side with jet clasps a cluster of natural, innocent, white violets nestled in the fall of Spanish lace at her throat her face was pale with pearl-powder, and she had eaten a couple of scented bon-bons to drown the smell of her recent brandy-tipple.
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