Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
It was really rather too bad to think that Miss Morgiana, after going to
one lover to have her hair dressed, should go with another to the play;
but such is the way with lovely woman! Let her have a dozen admirers,
and the dear coquette will exercise her power upon them all: and as a
lady, when she has a large wardrobe, and a taste for variety in dress,
will appear every day in a different costume, so will the young and
giddy beauty wear her lovers, encouraging now the black whiskers, now
smiling on the brown, now thinking that the gay smiling rattle of an
admirer becomes her very well, and now adopting the sad sentimental
melancholy one, according as her changeful fancy prompts her. Let us not
be too angry with these uncertainties and caprices of beauty; and depend
on it that, for the most part, those females who cry out loudest against
the flightiness of their sisters, and rebuke their undue encouragement
of this man or that, would do as much themselves if they had the chance,
and are constant, as I am to my coat just now, because I have no other.
“Did you see Doubleyou, 'Gina dear?” said her mamma, addressing that
young lady. “He's in the bar with your Pa, and has his military coat
with the king's buttons, and looks like an officer.”
This was Mr. Woolsey's style, his great aim being to look like an army
gent, for many of whom he in his capacity of tailor made those splendid
red and blue coats which characterise our military. As for the royal
button, had not he made a set of coats for his late Majesty, George
IV.? and he would add, when he narrated this circumstance, “Sir, Prince
Blucher and Prince Swartzenberg's measure's in the house now; and what's
more, I've cut for Wellington.” I believe he would have gone to St.
Helena to make a coat for Napoleon, so great was his ardour. He wore a
blue-black wig, and his whiskers were of the same hue. He was brief and
stern in conversations; and he always went to masquerades and balls in a
field-marshal's uniform.
“He looks really quite the thing to-night,” continued Mrs. Crump.
“Yes,” said 'Gina; “but he's such an odious wig, and the dye of his
whiskers always comes off on his white gloves.”
“Everybody has not their own hair, love,” continued Mrs. Crump with a
sigh; “but Eglantine's is beautiful.”
“Every hairdresser's is,” answered Morgiana, rather contemptuously;
“but what I can't bear is that their fingers is always so very fat and
pudgy.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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