Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, no. 24 October 1859 | Page 7

hoop! I suppose they do take them off at certain times,
but then they are not visible to the naked eye.
_Tomes._ Yes, Grey,--why take off her hoop? I don't care, you know,
to have hoops worn. But worn or not worn, what difference does it
make?
Grey. All against me?--a fair representation of the general feeling on
the momentous subject at this moment, I suppose. But ten years
ago,--that's about a year after I first saw you, and a year before we were
married, you remember, Nelly,--no lady wore a hoop; and had I said
then that you looked like a fright, or, as Mr. Key phrases it, a guy, I
should have belied my own opinion, and, I believe, given you no little
pain.
_Mrs. Grey_. Master Presumption, I'm responsible for none of your
conceited notions; and if I were, it wasn't the fashion then to wear
hoops,--and to be out of the fashion is to be a fright and a guy.
Miss Larches. Yes, the fashion is always pretty.
Grey. Is it, Miss Larches? Then it must always have been pretty. Let us
see. Look you all here. In this small portfolio is a collection of prints
which exhibits the fashions of France, Italy, and England, in more or
less detail, for eight hundred years back.
Miss Larches. Is there? Oh, that's charming! Do let us see them!
Grey. With pleasure. But remember that I expect you to admire them
all,--although I tell you that not one in ten of them is endurable, not one
in fifty pretty, not one in a hundred beautiful.

Miss Larches. Why, there aren't more than two or three hundred.
Grey. About two hundred and fifty; and if you find more than two that
fulfil all the conditions of beauty in costume, you will be more
fortunate than I have been.
Miss Larches [_after a brief Inspection_]. Ah, Mr. Grey, how can you?
Most of these are caricatures.
Grey. Nothing of the sort. All veritable costumes, I assure you. Those
from 1750 down, fashion-plates; the others, portraits.
_Mrs. Grey_. True, Laura. I've looked at them many a time, and
thought how fearfully and wonderfully dresses have been made. Not to
go back to those bristling horrors of the Middle Ages and the
_renaissance_, look at this ball-dress of 1810: a night-gown without
sleeves, made of two breadths of pink silk, very low in the neck, and
very short in the skirt.
Tomes. And these were our modest grandmothers, of whom we hear so
much! They went rather far in their search after the beautiful.
Grey. Say, rather, in their revelation of it. That was, at least, an honest
fashion, and men who married could not well complain that they had
been deceived by concealment. But that tells nothing against the
modesty of our grandmothers. What is modest in dress depends entirely
on what is customary; and there is an immodesty that hides, as well as
one that exposes. Unconsciousness is modesty's triple shelter against
shame. See here, the dissolute Marguerite of Navarre, visible only at
head and hands; the former from the chin upwards, the latter from the
knuckles downwards; and here, _La belle Hamilton_, rightly named, as
chaste as beautiful, and so modest in her carriage that she escaped the
breath of scandal even in the court of Charles II., and yet with a gown
(if gown it can be called) so loose about the bust and arms that the pink
night-gown would blush crimson at it.
Tomes. The ladies seem convinced, though puzzled; but that is because
they don't detect your fallacy. You confound the woman and the

fashion. An immodest woman may be modestly dressed; and if it is the
fashion to be so, she most certainly will, unless she is able herself to set
a fashion more suited to her taste. For usually a woman's care of her
costume is in inverse proportion to that she takes of her character.
_The Ladies [having a vague notion that "inverse proportion" means
something horrible'_]. Mr. Tomes!
Grey. Don't misapprehend my friend Daniel. On this occasion he has
come to judgment upon a subject of which he knows so little that it is
worse than nothing. I have reason to believe that he has a profound
respect for one of you, and, being a bachelor, such exalted notions of
your sex in general that he would not wantonly misjudge the humblest
individual of it. His remark was but the fruit of such sheer innocence
with regard to your charming sisterhood, that he has yet to learn that
there is not a single member of it, who confesses to less than seventy
years, to whom, even if she is black, deformed, and the meanest
hireling household drudge, her dress, when she is to be