When Madoline left the nursery Mowser resumed her original function of lady’s-maid. She had no particular gifts for the office. She had no taste for millinery; she had no skill in hair-dressing. She had been chosen by Madoline’s mother—a young lady of very simple habits—on account of her respectability and local status. She was the daughter of Old Mrs. Somebody, who had been thirty years a servant in the first Lady Lawford’s family. The houses of the menial and the mistress had been allied for a century or so; and for this reason, rather than for any other, Jane Mowser had been considered eligible for the office of maid. She was active and industrious, kept her mistress’s wardrobe and her mistress’s dressing-room in exquisite order. She could wash and mend laces to perfection. She could pack, and unpack, and was a devoted attendant in illness. But here her powers found their limit. The milliner and the dressmaker had to do all the rest. Mowser had no more taste than any villager in her native hamlet; no capacity for advising or assisting her mistress in any of the details of the toilet. She looked upon all modern fashions as iniquities which were perpetually inviting from heaven a re-issue of that fiery rain which buried Sodom and Gomorrah. To Mowser’s mind, jersey jackets and eel-skin dresses, idiot fringes and Toby frills, were the fulfilment of the prophet Isaiah’s prophecy. These were the ‘changeable suits of apparel, the mantles, and the tires, and the crisping pins, the mufflers, and round-tires like the moon;’ and all these things were the forecast of some awful doom. It might be earthquakes, or floods, or a hideous concatenation of railway accidents, or the exhaustion of our coal mines, or the total failure of butcher’s meat by reason of the foot-and-mouth disease. Mowser did not know what form the scourge would take; but she felt that retribution, prompt and dire, must follow the reign of painted faces, jersey bodies, and tight-fitting skirts. Young women could not be allowed so to display their figures with impunity. Providence had an eye on their sham complexions and borrowed locks. All picturesqueness of attire Mowser resented as a play-actress style of dress, altogether degrading to a respectable mind. She objected to Daphne’s neatly-fitting, tailor-made gowns, her soft creamy muslins, relieved by dashes of vivid colour, and thought they would end badly. Not so did young ladies dress in Mowser’s youth. Small-patterned striped or checked silks, with neat laced berthas fitting close to modestly-covered shoulders, were then the mode. There was none of that artistic coquetry which gives to every woman’s dress a distinctive character, marking her out from the throng.