VII
WHAT CAN BE GOT IN AMERICA
While I was preparing my article for the “Atlantic,” our friend Bob Stephens burst in upon us, in some considerable heat, with a newspaper in his hand.
“Well, girls, your time is come now! You women have been preaching heroism and sacrifice to us,—‘so splendid to go forth and suffer and die for our country,’—and now comes the test of feminine patriotism.”
“Why, what’s the matter now?” said Jenny, running eagerly to look over his shoulder at the paper.
“No more foreign goods,” said he, waving it aloft,—“no more gold shipped to Europe for silks, laces, jewels, kid gloves, and what not. Here it is,—great movement, headed by senators’ and generals’ wives, Mrs. General Butler, Mrs. John P. Hale, Mrs. Henry Wilson, and so on, a long string of them, to buy no more imported articles during the war.”
“But I don’t see how it can be done,” said Jenny.
“Why,” said I, “do you suppose that ‘nothing to wear’ is made in America?”
“But, dear Mr. Crowfield,” said Miss Featherstone, a nice girl, who was just then one of our family circle, “there 102 is not, positively, much that is really fit to use or wear made in America,—is there now? Just think: how is Marianne to furnish her house here without French papers and English carpets?—those American papers are so very ordinary, and, as to American carpets, everybody knows their colors don’t hold; and then, as to dress, a lady must have gloves, you know,—and everybody knows no such things are made in America as gloves.”