With all due respect to Mr. Smith, one must insist that Margaret’s shoes were all right as regards material and build. She would have been more comfortable if they had been “high-necked” shoes, and, in that case, the yarn hosiery would not have troubled him, but that is a minor detail. The quibble comes at the belt, and knowing that Margaret was an artist, we must be sure that Mr. Smith was mistaken. It may have been one of the woven cotton belts, not more than two inches wide, which, for a dizzy moment, were at the height of fashion, and then tottered and fell, but a “saddle-girth”—never!
In that charming morceau, The Inn of the Silver Moon, Mr. Viele puts his heroine into plaid stockings and green knickerbockers—an outrageous costume truly, even for wheeling.
As if recognising his error, and, with veritable masculine stubbornness, refusing to admit it, Mr. Viele goes on to say that the knickerbockers were “tailor-made!” And thereby he makes a bad matter very much worse.
In The Wings of the Morning, Iris, in spite of the storm through which the Sirdar vainly attempts to make its way, appears throughout in a “lawn dress”—white, undoubtedly, since all sorts and conditions of men profess to admire white lawn!
How cold the poor girl must have been! And even if she could have been so inappropriately gowned on shipboard, she had plenty of time to put on a warm and suitable tailor-made gown before she was shipwrecked. This is sheer fatuity, for any one with Mr. Tracy’s abundant ingenuity could easily have contrived ruin for the tailored gown in time for Iris to assume masculine garb and participate bravely in that fearful fight on the ledge.
Whence, oh whence, comes this fondness for lawn? Are not organdies, dimities, and embroidered muslins fully as becoming to the women who trip daintily through the pages of men’s books? Lawn has been a back number for many a weary moon, and still we read of it!
“When in doubt, lead trumps,” might well be paraphrased thus: “When in doubt, put her into white lawn!” Even “J. P. M.,” that gentle spirit to whom so many hidden things were revealed, sent his shrewish “Kate” off for a canter through the woods in a white gown, and, if memory serves, it was lawn!
In The Master, Mr. Zangwill describes Eleanor Wyndwood as “the radiant apparition of a beautiful woman in a shimmering amber gown, from which her shoulders rose dazzling.”
So far so good. But a page or two farther on, that delightful minx, Olive Regan, wears “a dress of soft green-blue cut high, with yellow roses at the throat.” One wonders whether Mr. Zangwill ever really saw a woman in any kind of a gown “with yellow roses at the throat,” or whether it is but the slip of an overstrained fancy. The fact that he has married since writing this gives a goodly assurance that by this time he knows considerably more about gowns.
Still there is always a chance that the charm may not work, for Mr. Arthur Stringer, who has been reported as being married to a very lovely woman, takes astonishing liberties in The Silver Poppy: