TWO SLAVES OF FASHION
I do not like the fashion of your garments.
--_Shakespeare._
I'm sure thou hast a cruel nature and a bloody.
--_Shakespeare._
Two young ladies, fashionably dressed, met each other that afternoon
just in front of our side window, which had been raised to let in the
air. From the warmth of their greeting I saw that they were on terms
of friendly intimacy.
One of the girls stood a little out of the range of my vision,
therefore I could not hear her voice when she talked, if, indeed, she
had a chance to say anything, but the vivacious monologue carried on by
her friend was amply sufficient to show the theme which interested them.
How glibly that pretty creature chattered! How fast the words flew!
How she arched her eyebrows and shrugged her shoulders and winked her
eyes and wrinkled her forehead and pursed her rosy lips and tilted her
nose and gesticulated with her slender hand and tapped the pavement
with her umbrella point, passing from each phase of expression to the
next with a rapidity truly wonderful. Occasionally she went through
with these strange grimaces all at once. She was indeed a whirlwind of
language, an avalanche of emotion.
Her voice was high pitched and shrill, so that every one on the street
must have heard her as she exclaimed:
"Oh, Nell, how perfectly lovely your new hat is! Turn around so that I
can see the other side. Oh-h, ah-h, that darling little bird with its
glossy plumage among the velvet is too sweet for anything! If anything
it is prettier than Kate Smith's hat with the thrush's head and wings,
although I'll admit hers is awfully stylish. You ought to see my new
hat. Ah, I tell you it's a beauty; soft crown of silvery stuff, and on
one side a tall aigrette and a dear little cedar-bird, and toward the
back is the cutest, cunningest humming-bird with its tiny green body
and long bill. It looks as if it were ready to fly or to sing. I
selected the trimming for sister May's new hat too. It is brown velvet
and has an oriole on it; you know they are so showy and bright it makes
you almost think you are in the woods. At Madame Oiseau Mort's, where
I get my millinery, there was another hat I had a notion to take. It
was built up with robins' wings and part of a tern was on it too, I
believe--just lovely! but afterward I was glad I didn't buy it, for
that decoration is more common. I counted nine hats in church last
Sunday trimmed with gulls. Of course they were pretty, for a handsome
bird makes any hat pretty.
"By the way, Nell, I must tell you something perfectly ridiculous! Do
you know papa pretends it's wicked for women to wear birds on their
hats or trim their gowns with feather trimming? Did you ever? I told
him we'd be a mighty sorry-looking set going around like a lot of
female Dunkards or Salvation Army women, without a bit of style, and he
said those women hadn't the sin on their souls of wearing birds that
had been killed on purpose to minister to their vanity; that he'd
rather be a peaceful-faced Dunkard woman or Salvationist with her plain
bonnet and her gentle heart than a gay society butterfly with her empty
head loaded down with dead birds.
"Isn't it perfectly horrid for him to talk like that? He is such an
old fogy in his ideas he actually makes me tired. Then he went on to
say that never again could he believe that women are the tender-hearted
creatures they have always been supposed to be, when they show
themselves so eager to be decked with the innocent songsters whose
lives are sacrificed by the million on the altar of fashion; the men
have always been taught that woman's nature was morally superior to
theirs, but we'd have to give up this criminal fad which we have
persisted in at such a fearful price of bird life before we could be
regarded as other than monstrously cruel and bloody. However, he
prophesied that the fashion can't continue much longer anyway, because
there soon won't be any birds left, and then, he says, we'll have a
world without its sweetest music. It will be hushed by the folly of
woman.
"Oh, Nell, don't you dislike to have anybody lecture you like that? It
makes one feel so uncomfortable. I don't suppose it's so very wrong to
wear bird trimming or our minister's wife wouldn't do it. You know her
black velvet hat with that big bird on it with the red points on the
wings, is one of the most striking hats that come to church. And her
feather muff is so elegant, awfully expensive too. And what would her
hat look like without that bird on it, I'd like to know? So if it
isn't wicked for her it isn't wicked for us, Nell, and I'm not going to
give up looking nice just to please papa. He'd like to have me dress
as antiquated as old Mrs. Noah when she came out of the ark, but I'm
not going to encourage him in his old-fashioned notions. And here,
Nell, just listen to this! Don't you think, he says the Episcopal
Prayer Book ought to be revised for the women worshipers and omit that
part of the litany where it says, 'From pride, vain-glory, and
hypocrisy, good Lord, deliver us.' What fol-de-rol!" And being out of
breath she stopped talking and they walked away down the street
together.