Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I love the baby that runs about under the trees of the Tuileries; I love the pretty little fair-haired girls with nice white stockings and unmanageable crinolines. I like to watch the tiny damsels decked out like reliquaries, and already affecting coquettish and lackadaisical ways. It seems to me that in each of them I can see thousands of charming faults already peeping forth.
It was as if each carriageful had privately and not very heroically resolved not to be at costs, and was rather discomfited at finding that it was getting no better entertainment than it gave. The middle of the piazza was filled with little tables, with shouting mountebanks, mostly disguised in battered bonnets and crinolines, offering chances in raffles for plucked fowls and kerosene lamps.
Their colours were primal, their crinolines and bonnets enormous the latter perched far back; their plumes, if cheaper, were even longer; where flowers and ribbons took the place of feathers heads looked like window boxes; their sleeves were so tight that they could not hold their prayer books at the correct angle, and more than one had stumbled over her train as she dropped her skirts and tripped into the church.
Well, I'm damned!" he kept repeating, he who never swore. Constance stood at the large, many-paned window in the parlour. She was stouter. Although always plump, her figure had been comely, with a neat, well-marked waist. But now the shapeliness had gone; the waist-line no longer existed, and there were no more crinolines to create it artificially.
"I should feel I was in a cage," quoth Hilaria at the suggestion that she should trammel her long legs in such a contraption unconsciously hitting on the essential reason for the allure of crinolines.
But it is a wide world, my little man and thank Heaven for it, for else, between crinolines and theories, some of us would get squashed and plenty of room in it for fairies, without people seeing them; unless, of course, they look in the right place. The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.
Madame de Laumières, who had begun an animated conversation on crinolines, admist the fragrant odor of Russian cigarettes, and who was making fun of the striking toilets, with which she had amused herself by scanning through her opera glass a few hours previously at the races, stopped, for even when she was talking most volubly she always kept her ears open to hear what was being said around her, and as her curiosity was aroused, she interrupted Sigmund Oroshaz.
The superb stiff folds of the crinolines suited the women; the cloaks and hats of the gentlemen seemed full of character. Once more Katharine felt the serene air all round her, and seemed far off to hear the solemn beating of the sea upon the shore. But she knew that she must join the present on to this past. Mrs. Hilbery was rambling on, from story to story.
"You have grown up to be beautiful, my child," observed old Mr. Lispenard. "There is nothing about you of this new generation, which I hate. Indeed, if you would wear crinolines and a curl of that dark hair on your shoulder, you would be quite perfect." His young caller blushed a little, but she laughingly retorted: "Did you say you had ceased to be dangerous?
She had more than once been overheard informing one of the cronies she used to meet on the boulevards that she was a religious woman, but she could not abide priests, that she said her prayers at home, and these were every bit as good as the fine ladies' who flaunted their crinolines in church.
Word Of The Day