A BROADWAY SHOP REVERIE.
Forty dollars for a pocket-handkerchief! My dear woman! you need a straight-jacket, even though you may be the fortunate owner of a dropsical purse.
I won’t allude to the legitimate use of a pocket-handkerchief; I won’t speak of the sad hearts that “forty dollars,” in the hands of some philanthropist, might lighten; I won’t speak of the “crows’ feet” that will be penciled on your fair face, when your laundress carelessly sticks the point of her remorseless smoothing iron through the flimsy fabric, or the constant espionage you must keep over your treasure, in omnibuses, or when promenading; but I will ask you how many of the lords of creation, for whose especial benefit you array yourself, will know whether that cobweb rag fluttering in your hand cost forty dollars, or forty cents?
Pout if you like, and toss your head, and say that you “don’t dress to please the gentlemen.” I don’t hesitate to tell you (at this distance from your finger nails) that is a downright——mistake! and that the enormous sums most women expend for articles, the cost of which few, save shop-keepers and butterfly feminines, know, is both astounding and ridiculous.
True, you have the sublime gratification of flourishing your forty-dollar handkerchief of sporting your twenty-dollar “Honiton collar,” or of flaunting your thousand-dollar shawl, before the envious and admiring eyes of some weak sister, who has made the possible possession of the article in question a profound and lifetime study; you may pass, too, along the crowded pavé, laboring under the hallucination, that every passer-by appreciates your dry-goods value. Not a bit of it! Yonder is a group of gentlemen. You pass them in your promenade; they glance carelessly at your tout-ensemble, but their eyes rest admiringly on a figure close behind you. It will chagrin you to learn that this locomotive loadstone has on a seventy-five cent hat, of simple straw—a dress of lawn, one shilling per yard—a twenty-five cent collar, and a shawl of the most unpretending price and fabric.
All these items you take in at a glance, as you turn upon her your aristocratic eye of feminine criticism to extract, if possible, the talismanic secret of her magnetism. What is it? Let me tell you. Nature, willful dame, has an aristocracy of her own, and in one of her independent freaks has so daintily fashioned your rival’s limbs, that the meanest garb could not mar a grace, nor the costliest fabric add one. Compassionating her slender purse, nature has also added an artistic eye, which accepts or rejects fabrics and colors with unerring taste; hence her apparel is always well chosen and harmonious, producing the effect of a rich toilet at the cost of “a mere song;” and as she sweeps majestically past, one understands why Dr. Johnson pronounced a woman to be “perfectly dressed when one could never remember what she wore.”
Now, I grant you, it is very provoking to be eclipsed by a star without a name—moving out of the sphere of “upper-ten”-dom—a woman who never wore a “camel’s hair shawl,” or owned a diamond in her life; after the expense you have incurred, too, and the fees you have paid to Madame Pompadour and Stewart for the first choice of their Parisian fooleries. It is harrowing to the sensibilities. I appreciate the awkwardness of your position; still, my compassion jogs my invention vainly for a remedy—unless, indeed, you consent to crush such democratic presumption, by labelling the astounding price of the dry-goods upon your aristocratic back.