“CLASS”
The other day the papers announced the death of the ex-Empress Eugénie. She lingered along, feeble and half-blind, until she was nearly 95 years old. She has been called “the Queen of Sorrows,” for few other women have lived a sadder life. Very few of this generation knew or cared anything about her. I presume most of our young people skipped the details of her life as given in the papers. Yet when I was a boy, shortly before the war between France and Germany, the women of the world regarded this sad empress as the great model of beauty and fashion. I suppose it would be hard for women in these days to realize how this beautiful empress dictated to people in every land how they should arrange their hair and wear their dresses. At that time most women wore their hair in short nets bunched just below the neck, and it was the age of “hoopskirts”—most of them, as it seemed, four to five feet wide. Just how this woman managed to put her ideas of fashion into the imagination of her sisters I never could understand. From the big city to the little backwoods hamlet women were studying to see what “Ugeeny” advised them to wear. I have often wondered if in her last days the poor, blind, feeble woman remembered those days of power.
Her death brings to mind an incident that had long been forgotten. I had been sent to one of the neighbors to borrow some milk, since our cow was dry. In those days, any caller—even a little boy—was like a pond in which one went fishing for compliments. The woman of the house, an immense, fat creature, with the shape of a barrel, a short, thick neck and a round moon face, had arrayed herself in glad clothes of the latest style—several years, I imagine, behind Paris. She wore an immense hoopskirt, which gave her the appearance of walking inside of a hogshead. Her hair was parted in the middle and brought down beside her wide face to be caught in a net just below her ears. I know so little and care so much less about style in clothes that I can remember in detail only two costumes that I have ever seen women wear. This outfit is one of them.
“This is just what Ugeeny is wearing,” said the fat lady as she poured out the milk. “You can tell your aunt that you have seen one lady dressed just like Paris.”
It did not strike me as very impressive, but I was glad to have the experience.
“You can tell her, too, that a very fine gentleman came here today and said I looked enough like Ugeeny to be her half-sister—dressed as I am now. He has been in Paris, too.”
“It was a book agent,” put in her husband, “and sold her a book on the strength of that yarn. Say, Mary, you don’t look any more like Ugeeny than old Spot does—and you don’t need to.”
“The trouble with you, John Drake, is that you have no idea of beauty.”
“I know it. I may not have any soul, but I’ve got a stomach, and I know that you can make the best doughnuts and Indian pudding ever made in Bristol County. That’s more than Ugeeny ever did, or ever can do. You are worth three of her for practical value to the world, and I think you a handsome woman—but you can’t look like her, because you haven’t got the shape, and I’m glad of it.”