Dear housewives, who wasted not their husbands’ substance in the old days, and now bring down vials of contempt from the daughters for anxious watchfulness over reckless servants! Sociable old bodies, to whom a cup of tea in the kitchen with a gossiping friend had been happiness, but “At Homes,” thronged with stylish people whose speech fairly bristled with h’s and g’s, bewildering misery.
Comfortable women who have weaknesses for violet, crimson, and bright brown, with large bonnets heavily trimmed, and are sternly arrayed in fashionable no colours, and for bonnets forced to wear a bit of jet, a flyaway bow and strings, that they say piteously feels as if they had no head covering at all.
I should like to build a Home for them, these dear, fat, snubbed orphans of society that is altogether too fine for them—I said fat, because if you notice it is always the fat ones who get into trouble: the [164] ]thin ones can shape themselves into place better,—to build a Home full of small cosy rooms, with centre tables, and chairs, not artistically arranged but set straight against the walls, with vases (pronounced vorses) in pairs everywhere, waxen fruit and flowers under glass, and china animals that never were on sea or land. There should always be a tea-pot, warmly cosied, cups big enough to hold more than one mouthful and not sufficiently precious to make one uncomfortable, plates of cake, cut, not in finikin finger strips, but in good hearty wedges.
These to be in readiness for all the dear old vulgar friends who had not got to fortune yet and loved to “drop in.”
And if I had a uniform at all for my orphans it should be of a good warm purple, with plenty of fringe and plush and buttons; and the standard weight of the bonnets should be thirteen ounces.
All this because of Mrs. Fitzroy-Browne!
Captain Woolcot had told Esther she need not call when the new people came to the district: he said he “hated mushroom growths, especially when they were so pretentiously gilt-edged,”—which was rather a mixed metaphor, by the way, but no one could tell him so.
For some time therefore all the young Woolcots [165] ]saw of the “mushrooms” was on Sundays, when a pew that had belonged to two sweet old maids—grey-clad always, sisters and lovers, never apart even in their recent deaths—blossomed out into a gay dressmaker’s showroom, from which all the congregation could during sermon time take useful notes for the renovation of their wardrobes.
Nellie’s hats were good signs of the times. The boys chaffed and scorned her unmercifully, but the poor child had such a weakness for having things “in fashion” that for her very life, when the Misses Fitzroy-Browne’s trimmings were all severely at the back of their hats, she could not leave hers at the front. Or if their frills crept up into the middle of their skirts and had an insertion heading, how could she be strong-minded enough to let hers remain on the hem with only a gathering thread at the top?
Poor Nellie! she had a great, secret hankering for the flesh-pots of Egypt. The love of pretty things amounted to a passion with her, and the shabby carpets, scratched furniture, and ill-kept grounds of Misrule were a source of real trouble to her.