"That blue and red plaid? Yes, it is very handsome; just the pattern of your woollen shawl, isn't it?"
"Plaids!" exclaimed Mrs. Murden, contemptuously. "Why, that's only a dollar silk; besides, everybody wears plaids—they're so common!"
"Then a thing is not pretty when it's common?"
"Why, of course not. I heard Mrs. George Barker say yesterday that no real lady wore such gay colors on the street; that, in Paris, plain colors are all the rage. I mean that rich purple, with the thick satin stripe. It's perfect."
Young Mrs. Murden had thought the plaids the very height of fashion, until she overheard this conversation between Mrs. George Barker and her mother. Who should know what was stylish, if Mrs. George Barker did not, when she lived in a house with a marble front, had a coachman in livery, and the family arms, done in the best manner, on the panel of her crimson lined carriage?
People said she had made a mistake in the last, however; that the stately swan of the crest should have been a tailor's goose. But, then, these were people who had no carriage of their own, and were obliged to patronize omnibuses. No doubt, if they could have afforded it, the paternal awl and lapstone would have been transposed into a dagger and shield, in a similar manner; so their opinion is no manner of consequence.
Mrs. Murden had gone into Evans & Gilman's to "price," as she called it, the very plaid she now scorned—for her best silk was giving way—when she overheard its sentence pronounced by those red lips, with a shrug of the sable-caped shoulders of the fashionable lady. Mrs. Barker pronounced the purple "exceedingly stylish;" Mrs. Murden "caught the verdict as it fell;" and, from that moment, her affections were centred upon it.
Not that she had any claims to being stylish herself; on the contrary, her little home, in a far away cross street, was exceedingly plain; but the young wife had undeveloped aspirations towards a less humble sphere, shown by being, in some sort, a leader of the circle in which she visited. It was not large, or very select, but there were some well-educated, well-bred people, some very warm, true hearts, and, as the case will always be, others as empty-minded, selfish, and frivolous as if they were really in fashionable life. Mrs. Murden, as her husband sometimes noticed, had rather an inclination to court the latter party, as they dressed and furnished the most showily, and, in fact, to outvie them—a disposition which the far-sighted Mr. Murden dreaded not a little.
He was decidedly a domestic man, and, besides, as his wife often said, so her dress was put on properly, with a clean collar and undersleeves, he did not know half the time whether it was silk or calico. Indeed, he had brought quite a serious attack of pouting upon himself, by calling his wife's new green foulard a calico. You may be sure, he had entirely forgotten that purple silks were ever manufactured by the next day at dinner, when he was reminded of it by Mrs. Murden abruptly terminating a long fit of musing by the exclamation—
"I should be perfectly happy, if I had it."