Mannequin

“ Blue! Silver! Pearl grey! Pale pink! Violet shadows! A real dream gown, madame! It needs a fairy to wear it.”
“A fairy like madame!” chimed Flavie.
“Exactly!” chirped Félice.
And the mannequin just smiled. And I was saying to myself:—
“Of course I do not intend to run away with that villain Philippe. But, all the same, it is detestable to have things settled for me so that I can't, anyway. I, who know myself to be nineteen and frivolous, know, too, that if a thing is made quite impossible for me, immediately, voilà! I must do it. The temptation is too great. ”

“ One mannequin is fair, another is dark, a third is petite, a fourth is tall. Each one is the perfection of her type—too perfect. As each sways up to Madame over the black carpet she gives Madame one half-smiling look in the eyes, then turns, lingers, sways a little, and slowly goes. Sometimes Madame puts out a hand and touches a gown. The mannequin stands like a piece of machinery suddenly stopped. All the time M. Flair remains with one plump hand on the gold couch, explaining, expounding, and, at length, advising. ”

“ I cried aloud, an idea striking me with such force and originality that I nearly exploded. “Flavie! Can you rent me your mannequin?”
They thought me mad, of course. Probably I was a little mad. Félice assured me quite seriously afterwards that she looked up the telephone numbers of all the really expensive sanitoriums in Paris that afternoon.
I talked at them like a phonograph; simply chattered and racketed away, as excited as a baby over my great scheme, but providentially too incoherent to give the Maison Goujet a very lucid idea of my plans. ”

“ Once I saw myself—the mannequin, I mean—talking gravely to a dull dowager duchess, and managing her fan “like an old hand,” as they say in the States. I was immensely proud of her.
But where in the world was Philippe? I hunted for him high and low; in the conservatories where he might have been making love to the débutantes, and under the bright lights, where he must be making love to the married women. But he appeared to be nowhere. My husband I saw twice, looking courteously bored the first time, but pleased the second, for he was talking to Folicœur, whom he loves. ”

“ I hoped that my mannequin was having a better time than I was.
I was not sure what I wanted. Women hardly ever are, in their hearts, if only they would tell the truth and admit it. Philippe Pavaney did not seem a very engaging person now that I saw him again. It was nice to have him madly infatuated with me, of course; but I found myself hoping against hope that he would not want to kiss me, or anything silly of that sort. It is odd that a woman will come close to contemplating eloping with a man whom she would hate to have hold her hand for very long. ”

“ He is the ideal made visible, if not audible—perfection put into a cutaway coat and trotted up and down like a mannequin in a cloak and suit atelier. Nor was there any long stress of training him—no season of doubt and misgiving. Nature heaved him forth full-blown, like a new star shot into the heavens. ”

“ The mannequin and I practised voices carefully. She was wonderfully quick, and a perfect mimic; and I warned her to say very little, and to speak low. People would think I was trying to disguise my voice, anyway, as it was a masquerade. After we were through rehearsing there were simply two of me instead of one.
Hugues' valet came to the boudoir door late in the evening with a note. This was what it said:
My Dear Cléo,—I understand that you are going to the Folicœurs to-night. ”

“ It is dull red; not a bit coppery, you understand, but with almost pinkish tones in it. I think if I were painting it, I should put purple in,
It was while I was looking at the mannequin, and thinking how clever it was of Charlemagne to have found such a double of me to try on my clothes, that a new consideration began to bother me. Domino or no domino, mask or no mask, there was no disguising my sort of person. A fine time I should have at the ball! Hugues would be able to pick me out anywhere, just by my head and figure. ”

“ Still, if I had to earn my living, I'm sure I'd rather do it among dainty, rich things, and see good jewels, and well-bred people, and nice turnouts every day, than do any other work in the world.
It occurred to me, as I looked at that girl, that I wouldn't make a bad mannequin myself. She is built just precisely the way I am, and she has quite as good a carriage, and was ten times better looking. If you covered up her face, you'd swear it was I. Her hair is exactly the same colour ”

“ He put his arm around me in the motor and kissed me, but we neither of us said a word.
When we got home I went straight to my rooms, and found the mannequin waiting for me. She was all nicely dressed in her own things, having turned my belongings over to Félice. I could not get much out of her concerning the evening as a whole. Evidently the gay world was rather a disappointment to her.
“Always I had thought it would be heaven,” she said, “to see the world of great ladies and fine messieurs; to be with them, and to hear them talk—not as one paid for a service, but as one of themselves. ”

“ Not until she is sure that the visitor is worthy of the lure does the saleswoman order the mannequin to show these exclusive models. She is eternally vigilant and can recognize a dressmaker in search of ideas rather than of frocks, or a woman moved by curiosity rather than by a desire to buy, as far as she can see her. There are many such visitors and they are treated civilly, but they see little for their pains and they are not encouraged to linger. ”

“ They blamed Mannequin for being the brother-in-law of a councillor in the Court of Appeal. As for Laprat-Teulet, who headed the list, he was greeted with insults and venomous abuse that bespattered them all. Truth to tell, he had done a stroke or two of business on his own account. People recalled the time when, finding himself mixed up in the Panama affair and threatened with arrest, he had grown a long beard that gave him a venerable appearance and was wheeled about in a little chair by his pious wife and his daughter, the latter dressed as a nun. ”

“ She was wonderfully deft with her needle, at which I rather marvelled, until I remembered that I had made a compact with myself to be surprised at nothing. But still on some festive occasions she would play the bedizened sylphid, enrapturing my eyes, and just awakening in me some faintly disturbing tremors. She liked me to design her frocks for her; and in truth I was nothing loth. It was a little thrilling to have a mannequin all of my own, and a very shapely one, on whom to hang my idle fancies. ”

“ Philippe would have said that it matched my eyes.
I insisted on stopping to order a domino on the way to the Rue de la Paix, and I felt feverishly excited. Félice kept shaking her head and muttering: “Sainte Marie! Sainte Marie!” under her breath, as she picked up my chatelaine and my muff. I dropped them six times before I got to Goujet. I think I frightened poor Félice, who is truly fond of me, quite as much by my sudden gaiety as I had by my seven days of moping.
II.
THE MANNEQUIN AT GOUJET'S.
You know, there really are compensations about being nineteen and frivolous. ”

“ A few mannequins have developed into saleswomen, a few have married well, a few have become notorious cocottes; one became a favourite attendant of Queen Victoria, and finally drifted over to New York to end her days there. A number have found unimportant places upon the French stage, but, in the main, the mannequins are very ordinary young women whose history is but the history of the average Parisian working girl. ”

“ He conducted his teaching on the principle which brings fortunes to the Parisian modiste, who takes good care that her mannequins are good-looking and of a fine figure, knowing that the visitors to the showrooms have no doubt, no matter how little Nature has done for their own features or figures, that in the robes of the mannequins they will appear equally fascinating. ”

“ New York women are quite as prone to be content with being mannequins for the display of their clothes rather than take greater pains to select clothes that are a completion of their own personalities—the last leaf left for the American woman to take out of the book of her Parisian sister. ”

“ Nothing could surpass the quaint peacock-like vanity of the girl mannequins who strutted up and down, moving their arms about to exhibit their sleeves and swaying their hips to accentuate the fall and flow of flounces and draperies. ”

“ It would be hard to imagine a woman of more miserable appearance. Not that her clothes were so mean, though they were poor and worn, but that an air of humiliation sat upon her, such as a dog has when it is lost and the children are chasing it. Her dress was that of an old woman—the long Manx cloak of blue homespun, fastened by a great hook close under the chin, and having a hood which is drawn over the head. ”

“ There was a joyous freedom in her air, her step, her glance, which, had she been less beautiful, less talented, less fortunate in social position or in wealth, would have placed her under the ban of fashion; but, as it was, she commanded fashion, and even Henry Manning, the very slave of conventionalism, had no criticism for her. He had been among the first to call on her, and the blush that flitted across her cheek, the smile that played upon her lips, as he was announced, might well have flattered one even of less vanity. ”

“ Manning had saved her as much as possible, but that filmy evening dress of hers was all in shreds, the diamonds—which she still wore in her dusky hair—looked grotesquely out of place. And so the fourth evening came, with Edith sleeping a few yards away, and Manning hunched up by the side of the fire, his empty pipe in his mouth and a look on his face that was not good to see. ”

“ OR, IN THE FASHION AND ABOVE THE FASHION.
"Some men are born to greatness—some achieve greatness—and some have greatness thrust upon them." Henry Manning belonged to the second of these three great classes. The son of a mercantile adventurer, who won and lost a fortune by speculation, he found himself at sixteen years of age called on to choose between the life of a Western farmer, with its vigorous action, stirring incident and rough usage—and the life of a clerk in one of the most noted establishments in Broadway, the great source and centre of fashion in New-York. ”

“ Henry Manning had received a new idea—that there are those who are above the fashion. Allied to this was another thought, which in time found entrance to his mind, that it would be at least as profitable to devote our energies to the acquisition of true nobility of soul, pure and high thought and refined taste, as to the study of those conventionalisms which are but their outer garment, and can at best only conceal for a short time their absence. ”

“ How’s any one to know whether you got a figure or not, in a thing that never hits you anywhere?” questioned the matriarch, not without a touch of pride anent her own fine proportions.
“You really ought to have a shirt-waist, Mrs. Yellett. You’ve no idea of the comfort of them, till you’ve worn them.”
“I don’t see but I’ll have to come to it.” Her tone was frankly regretful, as one who feels obliged to follow the behests of fashion, yet, in so doing, sacrifices a cherished ideal. Mary Carmichael choked over her coffee in an abortive attempt to restrain her audible hilarity. ”

“ Such being her appearance, she could not walk abroad with impunity; certainly not in the streets of Paris, where, from the ouvrier in his blouse to the flâneur on the Boulevards, every man looks upon a handsome woman as fair game for his flattering comments. Of course, in French fashion, Manon never went out unaccompanied. ”

“ But Marie Mancini was the last girl in all France to wed herself long to grief or an outraged vanity. There were other lovers by the score among whom she could pick and choose. She was more lovely now than when the recreant Louis first succumbed to her charms—with a ripened witchery of black eyes, red lips, the flash of pearly teeth revealed by every dazzling smile, with glorious black hair, the grace of a fawn, and a "voluptuous fascination" which no man could resist. ”

“ I have one more story to tell, and that is of Manx pride, which is a wondrous thing, usually-very ludicrous. A young farming girl who will go about barefoot throughout the workdays of the week would rather perish than not dress in grand attire, after her own sort, on Sunday afternoon. But Manx pride in dress can be very touching and human. When the lighthouse was built on the Chickens Rock, the men who were to live in it were transferred from two old lighthouses on the little islet called the Calf of Man, but their families were left in the disused lighthouses. ”

“ Manning, with the same high cheek-bones, the yellow mole on the upper lip, the sorrowful brown eyes: dressed in tulle now, though, the angular arms and shoulders bare, and coated with chalk, a pat of rouge laid on each cheek: under the tulle-body the same old half-sickness; the same throbbing back-tooth threatening to ache. The room was small, triangular: a striped, reddish cotton carpet on the floor, a door with a brass handle, my bandbox open on a chair, a basin with soapy water, soiled towels, two dripping tallow-candles: in short, a dressing-room in a theatre. ”

“ Then Auntie May began to get worse and worse, and she coughed so that she quite lost her voice and could only call me in a whisper. She had a doctor fetched, to Manxie's great disgust, and he said she had to put her mouth to the spout of a kettle that had benzoin in it, and she used to sit for hours with her lips to the spout till Manxie complained that the steam hurt her ceiling. French rooms are very funny, before you furnish them yourself; there is a mirror let into the mantelpiece and a stove in the dining-room. They cook quite differently, too, and Manxie's cook used to write poetry. ”