United States or Iran ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Hedwig was like a flower that required the sun. Only her sun was happiness. She was in soft white chiffons, her hair and frock alike girlish and unpretentious. Her mother, coming into her dressing room, had eyed her with disfavor. "You look like a school-girl," she said, and had sent for rouge, and with her own royal hands applied it.

Whichever of these modes the Parisian queen of "chiffons" rendered graceful in her own person, every fair one, with the slightest aspiration to style, strengthened her claims to be thought fashionable by scrupulously assuming. What wonder that Mademoiselle Melanie, prime minister to the absolute sovereign, could scarcely receive the crowd of clients that thronged her doors?

I thought people were very kind to leave us so long in peace. Dear Prince, how clever of you to find out our retreat!" The Ambassador stood bareheaded before them. "Dear ladies," he declared, "you are the lode-stones which would draw one even through these gossamer walls of lace and chiffons, of draperies as light as the sunshine and perfumes as sweet as Heine's poetry."

It was a kind plan, and gratified Jenny very much when it was proposed and proved to her that no duty would be neglected if she went about with the Homers and left her charge to the excellent lady who enjoyed chiffons as much as Ethel did, and was glad to receive pretty gifts in return for her services. But alas for Ethel's good resolutions and Jenny's well-earned holiday!

Among the translatable words of the French language, among the expressive terms which cannot be rendered by equally significant expressions in our own more copious tongue, among the phraseology invented to convey ideas which the phrases themselves certainly do not suggest, the common application of this curt little word "chiffons" holds a distinguished place.

The thought of Edith in such a costume, playing like a dryad over the stage, stayed with him when the dummy hand had been played and he had been recalled to the game by a thump on the shoulder. Edith in soft, pastel-coloured chiffons, dancing in bare feet to light string music. A forest setting, of course. Pan. A goat or two. All that sort of thing.

She shook it back, and danced the encore without the fillet. With her scant chiffons whirling about her knees, her loose hair, her girlish body, she was the embodiment of young love, of its passion, its fire. Edith had been spring, palpitant with gladness. Lethway, looking with tired eyes from the wings, knew that he had made a commercial success.

That was the strength, the anodyne, of drink, of cocktails, that they spread a glittering transformation about crass reality; people danced at stated times, in hot crowded rooms, because life was pedestrian; they were sick of walking in an ugly meaningless clamor and wanted to move to music, to wear pearl studs and fragile slippers and floating chiffons.

Pem knew that she ought to call them back; knew it from the white parting at the side of her throbbing little head to the toe of her satin slipper tumultuously beating the ground, as she sank down, an orchid amid her chiffons, to watch.

"The market people," he says, "form a ring about the reciter, a stalwart man, affecting little raiment besides a broad waist-belt into which his lower chiffons are tucked, and noticeable only for his shock hair, wild eyes, broad grin, and generally disreputable aspect.