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Across the street the first floors were, for the most part, small shops, and in the windows above them doctors' signs alternated with those of modistes, manicure artists, and milliners. The captain had come a roundabout way, stopping in at the Moriarty flat, where he found Mrs. Moriarty in a curious state of woe and tearful pride. "Oh, what will I do, sir?" she moaned.
"I shall have some beautiful costumes ordered for you when we arrive in London, my dear," said the fashionable mother on inspecting her daughter's wardrobe and commenting upon the array of materials before her. "Really, mamma, if I am to be bored by modistes from morn till eve I should prefer to remain at home.
The enemy, three times superior in number to the Prussians, lay in a half-circle with a view of surrounding the little Prussian camp, and, certain of victory, had encumbered themselves with a numerous train of women, wigmakers, barbers, and modistes from Paris. The French camp was one scene of confusion and gayety.
Even the Quixotism of some of their attempts at colonisation cannot fail to interest us, as at Gallipolis on the Ohio, a colony composed of expatriated people of the French court; perruquiers, coachbuilders, tailors, modistes, and the like.
"I think the modistes are largely to blame. No doubt the mother ordered a handsome evening dress, and the woman made it handsome and expensive and quite useless. You don't see Zay Crawford with any such things!" "Zay is beauty unadorned." "And Miss Nevins is ugliness intensified. I am really sorry for her, though she has improved a very little.
She did not say that those same Wednesdays of Madame Fromont's were very useful to her, that they were like a weekly journal of fashion, one of those composite little publications in which you are told how to enter and to leave a room, how to bow, how to place flowers in a jardiniere and cigars in a case, to say nothing of the engravings, the procession of graceful, faultlessly attired men and women, and the names of the best modistes.
By the aid of these, of pearl-powder, of rouge, of false hair, false teeth, and false tournure, as well as of the most skilful modistes of Paris, she contrived to hold a respectable footing among the beauties en peu passees of the French metropolis. In this respect, indeed, she might have been regarded as little less than the equal of the celebrated Ninon De L'Enclos.
A woman should remember that she "belongs to a sex which cannot afford to be grotesque." There should never be rowdiness or carelessness. The mania for extravagant dress on the stage, the pieces des robes, is said to be one of the greatest enemies of the legitimate drama. The leading lady must have a conspicuous display of elaborate gowns, the latest inventions of the modistes.
She dressed stylishly, and while her gowns were of rich material, and of a cut suggesting expensive modistes, she was always so quietly attired and in such perfect taste, that after leaving her one could never recall what she had on.
In the examination of costumes of different races and different ages, we are also struck by the fact that with primitive or isolated peoples costumes vary little from age to age, and fashion and the fashions are unrecognized, and a habit of dress which is dictated by climate, or has been proved to be comfortable, is adhered to from one generation to another; while nations that we call highly civilized, meaning commonly not only Occidental peoples, but peoples called progressive, are subject to the most frequent and violent changes of fashions, not in generations only, but in decades and years of a generation, as if the mass had no mind or taste of its own, but submitted to the irresponsible ukase of tailors and modistes, who are in alliance with enterprising manufacturers of novelties.
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