CHAPTER XXI.
Devices of Uneasy Age.—Bread Paste and Court-plaster to Conceal Wrinkles.—Accepting the Situation.—Plain Women and Agreeable Toilets.—Examples.—The Rector’s Daughter.—Dressing on Two Hundred a Year.—Écru Linen and White Nansook.—A Senator’s Wife.—A Washington Success.—Dull, Thin Faces.—Hay-colored Hair.—Advantages of Lining Rooms with Mirrors.
Did you ever go to see a lady, not of uncertain but of uneasy age, and find yourself ushered into the family sitting-room by a new servant, who did not know the ways of the house? Did you find her with a court-plaster lozenge an inch wide between her eyes, and one at the outer ends of her eyebrows? At sight of this remarkable ornament, did concern express itself lest she had fallen down stairs, or had a difference with the cat? Were these insinuations parried with veteran resources, and were you dissuaded from further inquiry by the delicate remark that she could interest you better than by giving the history of her scratches? Of course you knew there was a mystery about those bits of court-plaster, and perhaps feel so to this day, unless Nature have given you the mind of a detective. If so, your patience is to be rewarded. The secret of those patches was not scratches, but wrinkles.
I trust due tribute will be paid to the ingenuity of failing age, which has perfected this device for warding off its unwelcome tokens. The rationale of the plan is very simple. The plaster contracts the skin, and prevents its sinking into creases and lines. It also protects and softens the skin. I have heard of one oldish lady who wears these ornamental appendages all the time in the house when not receiving company, and covers parts of her face with a dough made of well-mumbled bread to keep her complexion fair. The heroism of this resistance to time must be applauded, but it is an open question whether the play is worth the candle. The beauty of age lies not in freshness like that of sixteen, but in clear and lofty expression, in the look of experience and not unkindly shrewdness, in the finish of self-repression, of calmness, trust, and sympathy. These things grow on a face as it loses freshness and roundness, just as the sky begins to show through thinning boughs.
The greatest of blessings for some people would be to learn to accept themselves and their gifts. If they could stand apart from themselves a while to see their becoming points, much of their repining would be dropped. Every thing and every body is beautiful in its season. There is a wholesome plainness that accords with domestic life and natural surroundings, as the bark of trees relieves their green. The color of health, the gentleness and sweetness that come of a conquered self, are elements of beauty that make any face tolerable. How dear are the plain faces that have watched our childhood, with whom we have grown up so closely that feature and form have lost their significance, so that we really do not know whether they are homely or not, and see only the love or the humor that lives in their faces. In general, very ugly people are happily indifferent to their looks, and degrees of imperfection may always be lessened by judicious use of the arts of dress.
A young and homely woman makes herself agreeable by the complete neatness of a very simple toilet. Let her eschew dresses of two colors, or of two shades even, though the latter are allowable, if the shadings are very soft. When the complexion is dull, there must be some warm or lively tinges of color in the costume, and vice versa. But it is easier to dress real figures than to generalize.
Cornelia Jackson is the rector’s daughter, and hasn’t above $200 a year to spend on her clothes and to buy Christmas presents. She is a little too plump, is brown, with some warm color in her cheeks in summer, and has dark hair. Her face never would be noticed except for the jollity lurking in it, which she inherits from her father. In winter and fall, when she looks pale, she “tones up” with a morning dress of all-wool stuff, one of those brown grounds with small bunches of brilliant crimson or purple flowers—a cheery pattern that the rector likes behind the coffee urn of a cold morning—with crisp white ruffles, set off by the brown dress. Crimson or purple, in soft brilliant shades, are her colors for neck-ties. Her street dress is a dark walnut-brown cloth, trimmed with cross-cut velvet the same shade. The over-skirts of Cornelia’s dresses are always long, so that she will not look like a fishing-bob or a doll pin-cushion; and there is deep rose-color about her bonnet. Not roses, by the way—she has an unspoken feeling that it is not for every body to wear roses—but velvety mallows and double stocks, imitations of fragrant common garden flowers that are very like herself. The brown and crimson maiden is a pleasant sight of a winter’s day, when the gray of the church and white of the snow need something warm to come between them. In summer she chooses, or her cousin in New York chooses for her, not the light percales that every one else is wearing, nor the grays and stone-colors that walk to church every Sunday, but écru linens, with relief of black or brown for morning, when she goes from pantry to garden, and from sewing-machine to nursery. Afternoons she doesn’t divide herself by putting on a white blouse and colored skirt, or a buff redingote over a black train, but wears a dress of one color, that looks as if it were meant to stay at home. White nansook is her delight, its semi-transparency wonderfully suiting her clear brownness, but solid white linen or cambric she eschews. Soft violet jaconet, and the whole family of lilacs, are made for her; and she is luxurious in ruffles and flounces on her demi-trained skirts, since she makes and often irons them herself. Black grenadine, of course, she wears, with high lining to give her waist its full length, every bit of which it needs; and she is not too utilitarian to neglect the aid which a modest demi-train on a house dress gives to her height. All the other girls may wear puffed waists and pleated waists. She knows they are not for her plump shoulders, though clusters of fine tucks on a blouse give length to the waist, and lessen the width of the back. Shawls she never wears, nor short perky basques, that are considered—I don’t know why—the proper thing for stout figures. Her choice is the long polonaise, and the French jacket, which by its short shoulders and simple lines conveys a decent comeliness of figure to any one who wears it. If she had a party dress, it would be white muslin, or light silvery green silk, trimmed with pleatings of tulle, and with them she would wear her mother’s pearls, or her own fine carbuncles.
Mrs. Senator, with all her fortune and position, is doomed to hear people speak of her in under-tones at parties, “She is rich, but very plain.” Being a shrewd woman, she does not waste her efforts on trying to alter her thin features, nor does she make herself ridiculous by a false complexion of rouge and pearl-powder, though her face and her hair are about of a brownness. But on her entry into Washington society she defied criticism by appearing with her hair créped to show its soft brown lights and shades, and give the best outline to her head, her gypsy face opposed to a dead white silk, of Parisian origin, with flounce of pleated muslin, and corsage trimmings of rich lace. It is a real dress and a real woman that is described, and it is no fiction that she was the success of the evening. The colorless dress without reflets, and her ornaments of clustered pearls, were in most artistic contrast to the nut-brown hair and dusky face. A spot of color would have destroyed the charm. The dress stamped her, as she was, a woman of skill sufficient to draw from the most unlikely combination the elements of novel and complete success.
The girl who sits near me at the hotel table tries my eyes with her thin, curious features, her pale, frizzed hair, that makes her face more peaked than it is, and her oversized skirts. She ought not to wear those light dresses, for she has no color, and her thin complexion is not even clear. She has that difficult figure to dispose of, which is at once girlish and tall, without seeming so. A trained dress would make her look lean, so she should dispense with a large tournure, and let her dresses brush the floor a few inches, wearing as many small flounces below the knee as fashion and sense allow. If her mother, who is rather a strict lady, would insist on having the girl’s dresses made with puffed waists, or loose blouses of thick linen, instead of the Victoria lawns that iron so flat, and show the poor shoulder-blades frightfully, the effect would be rather delightful. She ought to wear puffed grenadines and lenos of maroon, rosy lilac, or deep green—the first lighted with pale rosy bows at the throat and in the hair, the latter with light green and white, the lilac with periwinkle knots. How one would like to dress her over again, and turn the poor thing out charming as she ought to be. Her hair-dressing would all have to be done over again. Sharp-featured people shouldn’t wear curls, which make the peaked effect still more prominent. Soft waves, drawn lightly away from the face and brushed up from the neck behind, would be better, and smooth braids best of all, with little waves peeping out under them. If the young woman could train herself not to be excitable, or to smile so overcomingly, and not be so eager to meet new acquaintances, she would make a pleasing impression, while now she gets snubbed in a tacit way, and those who take her up out of pity hardly feel as if they were paid for it. If women with hay-colored hair could be brought to believe that light brown, of all others, wasn’t the color for their style, one could afford to overlook minor deficiencies.
One is tempted to think sometimes that there is a loss in not adopting the French plan of lining houses with mirrors. If people continually caught sight of themselves, they would hardly indulge in the grimaces and gaucheries which they inflict on the world. It could hardly lead to vanity in most cases, and would settle many vexing problems of dress and demeanor. One is not always to be censured for studying the glass. The orator must use it to learn how to deliver his sentences with proper facial play and easy gesture. The public singer studies with a mirror on the music-rack to get the right position of the mouth for issuing the voice without making a face. The want of such training mars the work of some great artists with blemishes which nearly undo the effect of their talents.
The injunction that all things should be done decently and in order means that they ought to be pleasing. The study of ourselves can hardly be complete without the aid of the mirror, which shows candidly the cold smile, the vacant, bashful gaze, we give our fellow-beings, instead of the decent attention, the kind, full glance it is meet they should have from us, and which we prefer to receive from them. It shows the frown, the sour melancholy, which creep over the face in reveries, and leads us to try and feel pleasant that we may look so. How much confidence one assuring glance at a mirror has given us in going to receive a visitor, and what kindly warning of what was amiss in expression or toilet before it was too late! Is our vanity so easily excited that we are ready to fall in love with ourselves at sight? The intimate acquaintance with our appearance which the glass can give is more likely to make one genuinely humble. In a world which owns among its maxims the gay and wicked refrain of “manners for us, morals for those who like them,” good people can not afford to neglect either their toilets or their mirrors.