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There were stately figures passing up and down: the old lords of the wilderness in velvet coats and huge wigs, and ladies of the wilderness too in rich brocades and laced stomachers. There were many slender and youthful figures.
'God help you! she said; 'do you ask that? and she glanced round her furtively in an agony of apprehension. Something had drawn all the gay gowns and embroidered stomachers towards the higher terrace. They were all alone in the arbour.
In a distant corner, slaves, dressed fancifully and turbaned like Barbary blackamoors, played on fiddles and guitars, and the music was such as I should have enjoyed, loving all melody as I do, yet could scarcely hear it in the flutter and chatter rising around me as the ladies placed the bosom-bottles in their stomachers and opened their Marlborough fans to set them waving all like restless wings.
The enormous starched ruffs of various colors, the long stomachers stiffened with wire and studded with jewels, the costly stuffs enriched with gold and silver, made up a costume which has never been surpassed in extravagance and fanciful exaggeration. The queen herself set the example of brilliancy of costume, and took care to be outshone by none.
You would see stomachers which looked like a piece of a coat of mail, and were made wholly of blazing diamonds. You would see emeralds and rubies and diamonds and pearls made in tiaras that is to say, imitation crowns and coronets and exhibited with a stout and solemn dowager for a pediment. One of the Wallings had set this fashion, and now every one of importance wore them.
"Nonsense!" I replied, "you are talking wildly. Of course there must be no word of this to Jeanne." "I am not likely to alarm her!" he replied, and ran lightly up the steps. The ladies were full of the approaching ceremony, and could talk of nothing but stomachers and brilliants and gold lace and such like stuff, without which they seemed to imply there could be no wedding at all.
Her very tears were turned into diamonds that sparkled on her capacious breast, neck, and arms, more brilliantly than stomachers, necklaces and bracelets of gems, on the courtiers of an Indian monarch.
But look at these stomachers, stiff with embroidery and jewels, and with points that reach half-way from the waist to the ground! See those enormous ruffs, standing out a quarter of a yard, and curving over so smoothly to their very edges! What a protection the fear of ruining those ruffs must have been against children, and other troublesome creatures! Grey.
The other boys were cast for women's parts, for women never acted then; and a queer sight it was to Nick to see his fellows in great farthingales of taffeta and starchy cambric that rustled as they walked, with popinjay blue ribbon in their hair, and flowered stomachers sparkling with paste jewels.
Little preposterous scarlet jackets; quaint old stomachers, more wicked than the smartest bodices; Polish pelisses, strained and tight as ripe gooseberries; tiny Greek caps, all awry, and clinging to the dark hair, Heaven knows how; every wild, quaint, bold, shy, pettish, madcap fancy had its illustration in a dress; and every fancy was as dead forgotten by its owner, in the tumult of merriment, as if the three old aqueducts that still remain entire had brought Lethe into Rome, upon their sturdy arches, that morning.
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