“Only what, animal?” pursued Nick severely.
“They were so—so original!” I gasped.
“Original? How can anyone’s clothes be original?” inquired Nick. “I have tried all my life to invent original clothes, and never achieved anything more original than when I was young enough to induce a scandalised tailor to sew blue serge with green thread.”
“Well, hers were,” I insisted. “And do you have the courage to tell me, Nick Marler, that you never saw them—or heard of them?”
Nick signified that such was the case. And at the thought of what lay before me I was near erupting again. But Nick held me to sanity with a cold grey eye.
“I suppose she wasn’t very well off,” I began. “None of us were, of course. And I suppose she must have had some German philosophy in her system. Her people came from Halle. So she set about solving the problem of dress. She said no woman could begin to dress who hadn’t at least ten thousand a year to do it on. For other women, then, the only thing was a sort of uniform—like postmen, or peasants. She really would have liked the costume of Thuringian village girls, she said, but was afraid it might be too conspicuous for New York. She therefore evolved a uniform of her own—always the same thing for the same time of day.”
“Very sensible, too,” put in Nick.
“The real beauty of it, though, was its compactness. She only kept three or four things going, and they were all”—I caught my breath—“reversible.”
“Reversible! How do you mean reversible?”
“How do I mean reversible? I mean reversible. I remember a certain brown skirt in which I oftenest saw her. When Zephine went to a party, Nicholas, what did Zephine do? Zephine turned her brown skirt inside out, Nicholas, and then it suffered a sea-change to a pea-green rich and strange, Nicholas, with brown leather bindings and big silver buttons—for Schönheit’s sake.”