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Sir Charles Dilke speaks of "silent crowds of tall and graceful girls, as we at first supposed, wearing white petticoats and bodices, their hair carried off the face with a decorated hoop, and caught at the back by a high tortoise-shell comb.
His exuberant soul abhors leanness as Nature abhors a vacuum; and hence all his women seem bursting their bodices with fulness, like overgrown carnations breaking out of their green calyxes. He gives you Venuses with arms fit to wield the hammer of Vulcan; vigorous Graces whose dominion would be alarming were they indisposed to clemency.
"How about the extreme of style in dress for this remarkably-to-be-pitied American girl you champion so eloquently?" queried Carley, sarcastically. "Immoral!" exclaimed Eleanor with frank disgust. "You admit it?" "To my shame, I do." "Why do women wear extreme clothes? Why do you and I wear open-work silk stockings, skirts to our knees, gowns without sleeves or bodices?"
While the ghosts of these long dead men and women, ladies in voluminous brocaded skirts and diamond-covered bosoms, bursting out of the lace and jewels of their stiff bodices, cardinals in trailing scarlet robes and bishops with well-powdered hair contrasting curiously with their Dominican or Franciscan dress, Roman nobles all in the strange old-world costumes, with ruffs and trunk hose and emblazoned mantles, of the Pope's household and of the military orders of Malta and Calatrava, secular dandies in elaborately-embroidered silk coats and waistcoats, ecclesiastical dandies to the full as dapper with their heavy lace, and abundant fob jewels and inevitable two watches on the sober black of their clothes; while these ghosts whom we have evoked in all their finery (long since gone to the bric-
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.
In the privacy of her own bedroom she took the skirts of two or three of her frocks off the band, inserted a piece of lining for lengthening purposes, and then added a frill to the waists of her bodices to hide the join. This dropped the skirts a good two inches, and made her look quite a tall, slim figure, as she was well aware. And none of these things were very harmful.
We sat aside in a recess of the lower hall, watching the throng as they passed: haughty dowagers, distorted in lead and disfigured in silk and feathers nodding at the ceiling; accomplished beaus of threescore or more, carefully mended for the night by their Frenchmen at home; young ladies in gay brocades with round skirts and stiff, pear-shaped bodices; and youngsters just learning to ogle and to handle their snuff-boxes.
"That's right, growl ahead, thou, tes beaux jours sont passes, but for me l'amour, l'amour que c'est gai, que c'est frais!" he half sung, half shouted. The moving mass of color, the Breton caps, and the Norman faces, the gold crosses that fell from dented bead necklaces, the worn hooped earrings, the clean bodices and home-spun skirts, streamed out past our windows as we looked down upon them.
That idea had remained with her, as had already been said, for some months, until, to be exact in regard to the date, the other young women, whom she had been watching with interest, had bought their brilliant blouses with the newest and, consequently, most abnormal sleeves, casting aside the sober-hued bodices which they had worn in hope.
Benedict; in stars on St. Clara's hood; in filagree embroidery in the letters of their names, in brooches and medallions on the bodices of the other female saints. The other colours seem to fill no part, but that of necessary stop-gaps, indispensable supports. They are too, for the most part, common and ugly to a degree that is most puzzling.
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