uttons. Then a black dress caught my eye which
had an embattled trimming of black and gold, continued round the waist
and completed with a large gold buckle. Then there was a grey cashmere
with red stars; and a bronze-coloured silk with black velvet a quarter
of a yard wide let into the skirt; the body all of black velvet. I
could go on if my memory would serve me. The rooms were full of this
sort of thing. Yet more than the dresses the heads surprised me. Just
at that time the style of hair dressing was one of those styles which
are endurable, and perhaps even very beautiful, in the hands of a
first-rate artist and on the heads of those very few women who dress
well; but which are more and more hideous the farther you get from
that distant pinnacle of the mode, and the lower down they spread
among the ranks of society. I thought, as I looked from one to
another, I had never seen anything so ill in taste, so outraged in
style, so unspeakable in ugliness as well as in pretension. I supposed
then it was the fashion principally which was to blame. Since then, I
have seen the same fashion on one of those heads that never wear
anything but in good style. It gathered a great wealth of rich hair
into a mass at the back of the head, yet leaving the top and front of
the hair in soft waves; and the bound up mass behind was loose and
soft and flowed naturally from the head, it had no hard outline nor
regular shape; it was nature's luxuriance just held in there from
bursting down over neck and shoulders; and hardly that, for some locks
were almost escaping. The whole was to the utmost simple, natural,
graceful, rich. But these caricatures! All that they knew was to mass
the hair at the back of the head; and that fact was attained. But some
looked as if they had a hard round cannon-ball fastened there; others
suggested a stuffed pincushion, ready for pins; others had a
mortar-shell in place of a cannon-ball, the size was so enormous; in
nearly all, the hair was strained tight over or under something; in
not one was there an effect which the originator of the fashion would
not have abhorred. Girlish grace was nowhere to be seen, either in
heads or persons; girlish simplicity had no place. It was a school:
but the company looked fitter for the stiff assemblages of ceremony
that should be twenty years later in their lives.

My heart grew very blank. I felt unspeakably alone; not merely because
there was nobody there whom I knew, but be