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Updated: June 4, 2025
No friend comes across Sir Adrian's path. All is silent. The old house seems wrapped in slumber. Above, the pretty guests in their dainty tea-gowns are sipping Bohea and prattling scandal; below, the domestics are occupied in their household affairs.
We had to wait till the trunks were carried up, and Perkins had unpacked our tea-gowns; then we shifted ourselves, and had our hair dressed, and went back to the withdrawing room. Perkins is a stranger to me, and I was sorry not to see Willet, Grandmamma's old maid: but Grandmamma never keeps servants long, so I was not surprised.
At the evening meal, which was the first time the whole four sat round the dining-room table together, Scrap appeared. She appeared quite punctually, and in one of those wrappers or tea-gowns which are sometimes described as ravishing. This one really was ravishing. It certainly ravished Mrs. Wilkins, who could not take her eyes off the enchanting figure opposite.
In the soft lamplight her clear white skin looked very pale and her auburn hair almost red. She wore one of those nondescript garments which we have elected to call tea-gowns, and Orsino, who had learned to criticise dress as he had learned Latin grammar, saw that the tea-gown was good and the lace real. The colours produced no impression upon him whatever.
The first was a boot and shoe maker, and in a few moments between four and five hundred francs had been spent. This seemed to Evelyn an unheard-of extravagance. Tea-gowns at five hundred and six hundred francs apiece were a joy to behold and a delicacy to touch. The discovery that every petticoat cost fifty francs seriously alarmed her. They visited the bonnet shop later in the afternoon.
No one's revision of judgment was more sweeping, perhaps, than that of Elsie Marley. Somehow her former shrinking had quite disappeared during the long illness, and the change in Mrs. Middleton's appearance helped bridge the way to a better understanding. The old wrappers and tea-gowns had gone to the ragman.
Maria realized that she herself, in Lily's place, could have no grasp of mind petty enough for pink and blue tea-gowns, that she had outgrown that stage of her existence. She still liked pretty things, but they had now become dwarfed by her emotions, whereas, in the case of the other girl, the danger was that the emotions themselves should become dwarfed.
It is to be feared that Myrtilla not only wore tea-gowns in advance of her time, but was also somewhat prematurely something of a "new" woman; but this was a subject on which she really did very little to "poison" Esther's "young mind." Esther's young mind, in common with those of her two subsequent sisters, was little in need of "poisoning" from outside on such subjects.
Now poor Annie was rather above hankering unduly after tea-gowns, or for that matter "smart" or "swell" dress of any kind. She liked pretty things, and things which became her charming person, at their proper time and season, well enough, but she was not greatly discomposed by the lack of such adornment, and hardly at all troubled when her neighbours displayed what she did not possess.
And while the pictures bored her unspeakably, she took a deep pleasure in her own cleverness about them, and delighted in tracing the influence Paolo Veronese must have had upon Boucher, a hint from Arabella which she had announced as an inspiration of her own. She had tea-gowns made to suit this period, and adopted the stately movements which were evidently the attribute of that time.
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