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Updated: June 11, 2025
When I sat again on the great divan, I said to myself that, after all, the alien mind who designed this room had worked with cunning; he must have seen in his fancy the very picture that was now so delightful to my eyes the gray old fireplace with its tall columns wound with vines whose delicate leaves quivered as the firelight fanned them; before it Penelope, a slender figure, softly drawn in the evening's shadow, bent over the low tea-table as she worked with the rebellious lamp; from above, looking down kindly, half smiling, Reynolds's majestic lady, frilled and furbelowed; at her feet a giant white bear, its long claws gripping the polished floor, its jaws distended fiercely as though it stood guard, ready to spring at him who dared to cross the charmed circle drawn by the glowing coals.
She was flounced and furbelowed from Head to Foot; every Ribbon was wrinkled, and every Part of her Garments in Curl, so that she looked like one of those Animals which in the Country we call a Friezeland Hen.
Mistress Mary was pale with dismay, and yet her mouth twitched with laughter at the notion of displaying, before the horrified eyes of Madam Cavendish, those grim adornments which had arrived in the Golden Horn. "La," said she, "when they come a-trundling in a powder-cask and I courtesy and say, 'Madam, here is my furbelowed and gold-flowered sacque, I wonder what will come to pass."
The garb of this dame Leonarda was by no means of that humble nature which one might have supposed. A gown of crimson silk, flounced and furbelowed to the knees, was tastefully relieved by a bright yellow shawl; and a pair of heavy pendants glittered in her ears, which were of the size proper to receive "the big words" they were in the habit of hearing.
We have had quite a stream of fashionable, furbelowed dames trooping up the steps; very few of them people that papa and I cared to keep in touch with; you know his dislike for the merely pleasure-seeking side of life.
I remember some most tasteful costumes which we produced; and as we contemplated them as they hung, flounced, furbelowed, and finished, upon pegs, Eleanor said: "I wonder where we shall display these this year?" How little we knew! We had made the dresses alike, to the nicety of a bow, because we thought it ladylike that the costumes of sisters should be so.
And I thought as I went through the big square, roomy rooms that I wouldn't swap this good old house for dozens of Queen Anns, or any other of the fashionable, furbelowed houses of to-day.
Her complexion was not a decided pink, but a soft, rosy tint not much deeper than that of Trot's skin. Instead of a silken gown furbelowed like all the others they had seen women wear in this land, Tourmaline was dressed in a severely plain robe of coarse pink cloth much resembling bedticking.
A set of clouds after the French mode, streaked with lightning and furbelowed. A new moon, something decayed. A pint of the finest Spanish wash, being all that is left of two hogsheads sent over last winter. A coach very finely gilt, and little used, with a pair of dragons, to be sold cheap. A setting-sun, a pennyworth.
And my Lady Hopwood, and the fine Madams her daughters, all laced and furbelowed, and with widows' and orphans' tears, and the blood-drops of crimped seamen and kidnapped children, twinkling in their Stomachers for gems, were all set at their Bowery window, a pudding-fed Chaplain standing bowing and smirking behind them, and glozing in their ears no doubt Praises of their exceeding Charity and Humanity to wretches such as we were.
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