twentieth year now, which sounds--didn't somebody say so over my
shoulder?--so very old! Adelaide Marchbanks used to say of her that
she had "stayed fifteen."

She _looked_ real. Her bright hair was gathered up loosely, with some
graceful turn that showed its fine shining strands had all been
freshly dressed and handled, under a wide-meshed net that lay lightly
around her head; it was not packed and stuffed and matted and put on
like a pad or bolster, from the bump of benevolence, all over that and
everything else gentle and beautiful, down to the bend of her neck;
and her dress suggested always some one simple idea which you could
trace through it, in its harmony, at a glance; not complex and
bewildering and fatiguing with its many parts and folds and
festoonings and the garnishings of every one of these. She looked more
as young women used to look before it took a lady with her dressmaker
seven toilsome days to achieve a "short street suit," and the public
promenades became the problems that they now are to the inquiring
minds that are forced to wonder who stops at home and does up all the
sewing, and where the hair all comes from.

Some of the girls said, sometimes, that "Leslie Goldthwaite liked to
be odd; she took pains to be." This was not true; she began with the
prevailing fashion--the fundamental idea of it--always, when she had a
new thing; but she modified and curtailed,--something was sure to stop
her somewhere; and the trouble with the new fashions is that they
never stop. To use a phrase she had picked up a few years ago,
"something always got crowded out." She had other work to do, and she
must choose the finishing that would take the shortest time; or satin
folds would cost six dollars more, and she wanted the money to use
differently; the dress was never the first and the _must be_; so it