Thus lifted above all mercenary anxieties, I gave my attention entirely to the self-improvement necessary to my appearance before his highness as a representative character on whom the eyes of all Sprucehill were fixed. I would say the world—only for the modest consciousness that comes over me when I think of myself as a genius.
VII.
THE FRENCH DRESS-MAKER.
ALPACA does make a first-class dress for our social gatherings and literary circles in Sprucehill, and when puffed out behind, and trimmed promiscuously with flutings, it sometimes has a sumptuous appearance elsewhere; but for a ball, in which one aims to dance with a great grand Archduke of all the Russias—excuse me for saying it, but alpaca is not quite the thing. Doubtful of my own imperfect judgment, I asked a fashionable dress-maker in the Third Avenue, who had "Madame" spelt with an E on her tin sign at the door, and she said: "It wasn't the thing for a lady entirely, by no manner of means," and her tongue had a rich roll to it, which satisfied me that Ireland had sympathized with France in her troubles, to the extent of getting the language a little mixed.
"No," says she, a leaning both elbows on her counter, and a looking at me from head to foot. "Madame should have a robe de silk, very complete, with flowers in her hair entirely, and an overskirt to the fore, garnitured with Limerick point."
"An overskirt before," says I, lifting both hands, satchel and all. "Why, every skirt that I've seen in the street, or anywhere else, was puckered and bunched up behind," says I. "Excuse me, but I really couldn't think of wearing 'em in any other way."
The French dress-maker—I know she was French by the letter E after Madam, and because the sign said she was from Paris. Well, she colored up, and looked every which way at first, but then she gave a skimping laugh, and said that I didn't understand French. I—I didn't understand French! I who had studied "French without a Master" as a speciality, with the most intelligent member of our circle, and conversed in the language as directed by that excellent book so fluently that the pronunciation sounded almost like English nipped off a little! This was too much.
The clear grit, which lies at the bottom of every New England woman's heart, riled up in mine when that cherished accomplishment was cast into disrepute.
"Madame," says I, putting a keen emphasis on that E, "I came here to inquire about the most fashionable way of making a dress, not to give or take a lesson in the languages. Permit me to say I never could submit to wear an overskirt in the way you speak of—wrong side before—why, it would look dreadfully."