"I can't stand it, Aunt Gwendolin," I whisperingly gasped.
"Yes, you can!" she returned peremptorily, "you'll get used to it; that's nothing like as tight as the girls all wear them in this country."
"I can't breathe," I gasped again, when the modiste had turned her back; (Aunt Gwendolin had signed to me the first time not to let her hear me).
"Hush!" said my aunt; "for pity sake do not let the modiste know that you never had a corset on before."
"I'd rather have my feet bound like the women do in Chi——"
Aunt Gwendolin placed her jewelled fingers over my mouth before I had finished the sentence.
Just as I was through being "fitted," one of Aunt Gwendolin's fashionable friends came in. "Arabella," my aunt called her, but the modiste called her Mrs. Delaney. I was not noticed, and slipped off into a corner, and this newcomer and my relative fell into a deep and absorbing talk about the new style of sleeve. I saw my opportunity and slipped unnoticed out the front door, which fortunately was behind them.
Hurrying down a few blocks I reached a bookseller's window. With one glance I had noticed, when my aunt and I were passing the window on the way to the establishment of the Parisienne modiste, the word China on the cover of a book. "I'll buy that book," I had said to myself, "and learn what there is about China that makes Americans despise her people."
Entering the store, I found a number of books about China and the Chinese: "One of China's Scholars," "How the Chinese Think," "The Greatest Novels of China," "Chinese Life." I paid for them all and ordered them sent to my grandmother's house.