Long generations of unaspiring humility have bequeathed her this
soft and candid sign of distinction: as her turn comes in the line
of inheritance she spends her life in keeping unsullied its difficult
purity, and she will leave to her daughters the critical task of its
equipoise. If she soils or rumples or tears it, she descends in her
little scale of dignities and becomes an ouvrière. If she loses it,
she is unclassed entirely, and enters the half-world. The porter's
wife with her dubious mob-cap, and the hard, flaunting grisette with
her melancholy feathers and determined chapeau, are equally removed
from the white cap of the "young person." To maintain it in its vestal
candor and proud sincerity is not always an easy task in a land where
every careless student and idle nobleman is eager to tumble it
with his fingers or to pin among its frills the blossom named
love-in-idleness: Mimi Pinson has to wear her cap very close to her
wise little head. To herself and to those among whom she moves nothing
perhaps seems more natural than the successful carriage of this white
emblem, triumphantly borne from age to age above the dust of labor
and in the face of all kinds of temptation; but to the republican from
beyond the seas it is a kind of sacred relic. The Yankee who knows
only the forlorn aureoles of wire and greased gauze surrounding the
sainted heads of Lowell factory-girls, and the frowsy ones of New
York bookbinders, is struck by the artisanne cap as by something
exquisitely fresh, proud and truthful.

My landlady's cap was as far removed from pretence as from vulgarity.
Her hair was brown, smooth, old-fashioned and nun-like. I looked
at her hand, which, having replaced the pen, was inviting me with a
gesture of its handsome squared fingers to contribute my autograph,
I made my note, pausing often to look up at my beautiful
writing-mistress: "PAUL FLEMMING, American: from Paris to Marly--by