DOI article:
Dowie, Ménie Muriel: An idyll in millinery
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.26393#0029
By Menie Muriel Dowie 25
Sometimes his eye rested upon the seven or eight unemployed
shop-ladies who stood behind the curtains, like spiders, and looked
with an almost malevolent contemptuousness upon the street
starers who came not in to buy, but lingered long, and seemed to
con the details of attractive models. More than once, a group
in either of the rooms fascinated him for full a minute. One
particularly, because its component parts declared themselves so
quickly to his apprehension.
A young woman, with fringe carefully ordered to complete
formlessness and fuzz, who now sat upon a chair and now rose
to regard herself in a glass as she poised a confection of the toque
breed upon her head. With her, a friend, older, of identical
type, but less serious mien, whose face pringied into vivacious
comment upon each venture ; comment which of course Liphook
could not overhear. With them both, an elder lady, to whom
the shopwoman, a person of clever degage manner and primrose
hair, principally addressed herself; appealingly, confirmatively,
rapturously, critically—according to her ideas upon the hat in
question. In and out of their neighbourhood moved a middle-
aged woman of French appearance, short-necked, square-
shouldered, high-busted, with a keen face of chamois leather
colour and a head to which the black hair seemed to have been
permanently glued—Madame Felise herself. When she threw
a word into the momentous discussion the eyes of the party
turned respectfully upon her ; each woman hearkened. Even
Liphook divined that the girl was buying her trousseau millinery
the older sister, or married friend, advising in crisp, humorous
fashion, the elder lady controlling, deciding, voicing the great
essential laws of order, obligation and convention ; the shop-
woman playing the pipes, the dulcimer, the sackbut, the tabor or
the viol—Madame Felise the while commanding with invisible
baton
Sometimes his eye rested upon the seven or eight unemployed
shop-ladies who stood behind the curtains, like spiders, and looked
with an almost malevolent contemptuousness upon the street
starers who came not in to buy, but lingered long, and seemed to
con the details of attractive models. More than once, a group
in either of the rooms fascinated him for full a minute. One
particularly, because its component parts declared themselves so
quickly to his apprehension.
A young woman, with fringe carefully ordered to complete
formlessness and fuzz, who now sat upon a chair and now rose
to regard herself in a glass as she poised a confection of the toque
breed upon her head. With her, a friend, older, of identical
type, but less serious mien, whose face pringied into vivacious
comment upon each venture ; comment which of course Liphook
could not overhear. With them both, an elder lady, to whom
the shopwoman, a person of clever degage manner and primrose
hair, principally addressed herself; appealingly, confirmatively,
rapturously, critically—according to her ideas upon the hat in
question. In and out of their neighbourhood moved a middle-
aged woman of French appearance, short-necked, square-
shouldered, high-busted, with a keen face of chamois leather
colour and a head to which the black hair seemed to have been
permanently glued—Madame Felise herself. When she threw
a word into the momentous discussion the eyes of the party
turned respectfully upon her ; each woman hearkened. Even
Liphook divined that the girl was buying her trousseau millinery
the older sister, or married friend, advising in crisp, humorous
fashion, the elder lady controlling, deciding, voicing the great
essential laws of order, obligation and convention ; the shop-
woman playing the pipes, the dulcimer, the sackbut, the tabor or
the viol—Madame Felise the while commanding with invisible
baton