FOR LADIES THAT “GO SHOPPING.”
Matrimony and the toothache may be survived, but of all the evils feminity is heir to, defend me from a shopping excursion. But, alas! bonnets, shoes and hose will wear out, and shop-keepers will chuckle over the sad necessity that places the unhappy owners within their dry-goods clutches. Felicitous Mrs. Figleaf! why taste that Paradisaical apple?
Some victimised females frequent the stores where soiled and damaged goods are skillfully announced as selling at an “immense sacrifice,” by their public-spirited and disinterested owners. Some courageously venture into more elegant establishments, where the claim of the applicant to notice, is measured by the costliness of her apparel, and where the clerks poise their eye-glass at any plebeian shopperess bold enough to inquire for silk under six dollars a yard. Others, still, are tortured at the counter of some fussy old bachelor, who always ties up, with distressing deliberation, every parcel he takes down for inspection, before he can open another, and moves round to execute your orders as if Mt. Atlas were fastened to his heels; or perhaps get petrified at the store of some snap-dragon old maid, whose victims serve as escape-valves for long years of bile, engendered by Cupid’s oversights. Meanwhile, the vexed question is still unsolved, Where can the penance of shopping be performed with the least possible wear and tear of patience and prunella? The answer seems to me to be contained in six letters—“Stewart’s.”
“Stewart’s?” I think I hear some old lady exclaim, dropping her knitting and peering over her spectacles; “Stewart’s! yes, if you have the mines of California to back you.” Now I have a profound respect for old ladies, as I stand self-pledged to join that respectable body on the advent of my very first gray hair; still, with due deference to their catnip and pennyroyal experience, I conscientiously repeat—“Stewart’s.”
You may stroll through his rooms free to gaze and admire, without being annoyed by an impertinent clerk dogging your footsteps; you can take up a fabric, and examine it, without being bored by a statement of its immense superiority over every article of the kind in the market, or without being deafened by a detailed account of the enormous sums that the mushroom aristocracy have considered themselves but too happy to expend, in order to secure a dress from that very desirable, and altogether unsurpassed, and unsurpassable, piece of goods!
You can independently say that an article does not exactly suit you, though your husband may not stand by you with a drawn sword. You will encounter no ogling, no impertinent cross-questioning, no tittering whispers, from the quiet, well-bred clerks, who attend to their own business and allow you to attend to yours.
’Tis true that you may see at Stewart’s, cobweb laces an inch or two wide, for fifty or one hundred dollars a yard, which many a brainless butterfly of fashion is supremely happy in sporting: but at the very next counter you may suit yourself, or your country cousin, to a sixpenny calico, or a shilling de laine; and, what is better, be quite as sure that her verdant queries will be as respectfully answered as if liveried Pompey stood waiting at the door to hand her to her carriage.
You can go into the silk department, where, by a soft descending light, you will see dinner dresses that remind you of a shivered rainbow, for passé married ladies who long since ceased to celebrate their birth-days, and who keep their budding daughters carefully immured in the nursery: or, at the same counter, you can select a modest silk for your minister’s wife, at six shillings a yard, that will cause no heart-burnings in the most Argus-eyed of Paul Pry parishes.
Then if you patronise those ever-to-be-abominated and always-to-be-shunned nuisances called parties, where fools of both sexes gather to criticise their host and hostess, and cut up characters and confectionary, you can step into that little room from which day-light is excluded, and select an evening dress, by gas-light, upon the effect of which you can, of course, depend, and to which artistic arrangement many a New York belle has probably owed that much prized possession—her “last conquest.”
Now, if you please, you can go into the upholstery-room and furnish your nursery windows with a cheap set of plain linen curtains; or you can expend a small fortune in regal crimson, or soft-blue damask drapery, for your drawing-room; and without troubling yourself to thread the never-ending streets of Gotham for an upholsteress, can have them made by competent persons in the upper loft of the building, who will also drape them faultlessly about your windows, should you so desire.