United States or Algeria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"The green-room, my dear madam, is the bower where houris put off their wings, and goddesses become dowdies; where Lady Macbeth weeps over her lap-dog, dead from repletion; and Belvidera soothes her broken heart with a dozen of oysters. In a word, it is the place where actors and actresses become men and women, and act their own parts with skill, instead of a poet's clumsily." Mabel.
Look at her: she is the best-dressed lady in the room; her muslin is Indian, and of a quality unknown to these provincial shopkeepers; a rajah gave it us: her pearls were my mother's, and have been in every court in Europe; and she herself is beautiful, would be beautiful dressed like the dowdies who are criticising her: and I think, sir, she dances as well as any lady can encumbered with an Atom that does not know the figure."
Von Rosen had the captain's eye in matters of the toilette; she was none of those who hang in Fabian helplessness among their finery, and, after hours, come forth upon the world as dowdies. A glance, a loosened curl, a studied and admired disorder in the hair, a bit of lace, a touch of colour, a yellow rose in the bosom; and the instant picture was complete. "That will do," she said.
An improper person?" Elsa laughed. "My dear Martha, your comparisons are faulty. I know but two duchesses in this wide world who are not dowdies, and one of them is an American. An improper person is generally the most proper, outside her peculiar environments. Can't you suggest something else?" Martha searched but found no suitable reply.
Von Rosen had the captain's eye in matters of the toilette; she was none of those who hang in Fabian helplessness among their finery and, after hours, come forth upon the world as dowdies. A glance, a loosened curl, a studied and admired disorder in the hair, a bit of lace, a touch of colour, a yellow rose in the bosom; and the instant picture was complete. 'That will do, she said.
This was the beginning of the great macintosh epoch, by-product of the war, when the paucity of the means of vehicular locomotion had rendered macintoshes permissible, even for women with pretensions to smartness; and at intervals stylish girls on their way home from unaccustomed overtime, passed the doors in transparent macintoshes of pink, yellow or green, as scornful as military officers of the effeminate umbrella, whose use was being confined to clubmen and old dowdies.
But the lesson had been from Isaiah, where the unreasonable old prophet is indignant with the ladies of Zion because they don't want to look like dowdies, you remember: 'Tremble, ye women that are at ease, strip you and make you bare and gird sackcloth upon your loins. And off he went like a comet, with the fashionable woman for his tail.
"It can't be done," she thought. "Half of them will be in gray and half of them in brown, and a few old dowdies will perhaps be in black. But I must be gay; it isn't fair to Aunt Katie to be anything else." She made a wild and scarcely judicious selection. She put on crimson silk stockings, and tucked into her bag a pair of crimson satin shoes.
"Lady Howard, indeed! why, do you think I'd wear one of her dowdies? No, I'll promise you, I sha'n't put on no such disguisement. It's the unluckiest thing in the world that I did not make the man pick up the curls again; but he put me in such a passion, I could not think of nothing.
First she set apart as most precious and desirable, and requiring the most careful treatment, the "court dowdies " for so it was that the dignity and quiet good taste that radiated from Buckingham Palace impressed her restless, shallow mind the sort of people who prefer pair horse carriages to automobiles, have quiet friendships in the highest quarters, quietly do not know any one else, busy themselves with charities, dress richly rather than impressively, and have either little water-colour accomplishments or none at all, and no other relations with "art."
Word Of The Day