PROLOGUE
“No man is hero to his valet”; so runs the cynical adage. But you can reverse the saying with reference to the other sex.Every woman is a heroine to her lady’s maid; it may not be true in all cases, but ’tis true enough for any proverb.
The romance of a lady’s own woman is centred in her mistress. She will clothe her in finery with a greater joy than if she were draping herself; rather than see her go shabby she would wear sackcloth; she will hang over the banisters, on a dinner-party night, to observe the sit of her train as she sweeps downstairs on the arm of some notable personage; she will lean out of the window to watch her step into her sedan, and if there are Beaux hovering and my Lady tosses her plumes and whisks her panniers to proper advantage it is Abigail’s heart that beats high with pride.
Even Miss Lydia Pounce, own woman to my Lady Kilcroney, a damsel remarkable from her earliest youth for her tart and contradictious ways, who was verging on elderliness now with the acidity and leanness peculiar to the “born old maid,” would have laid down her life to ensure that my Lady’s court gown should fit her trim waist without a wrinkle, or that the pink silk stocking that clothed her pretty leg was drawn to its proper skin-tight limit.
(Both the Incomparable Kitty and her Lydia were exceedingly particular that these same stockings should never be worn with the gross slovenliness that permitted a sag. Not indeed that anything but the merest glimpse of slender, arched feet, like the “little mice” of an earlier poet’s fancy, peeping in and out from under theflutter and foam of lace and silken flounce, was ever displayed to the vulgar eye; but to know these niceties complete in the smallest and most delicate detail was necessary to the comfort of any self-respecting Woman. And on this point Lydia was in thorough sympathy with her mistress, as upon all others connected with the elegance andbon tonof the most modish of Mayfair belles; of that leader of Fashion, Feeling and Style which the Lady Kilcroney undoubtedly was.)
If Woman be a heroine to her lady’s maid, in what light does she appear to her Milliner?
Here we come upon debatable ground. At first sight it would seem that the milliner, being dependent upon her customers for her very existence, it must follow that whatever her private opinion may be with regard to their appearance and taste, she can have but one burning desire: to please her patronesses. There is nevertheless another side to the question.
What Woman of intelligence but does not realise that a Mode may make or mar her? How much may hang on the droop of a feather; the tilt of a hat-brim; the glow of a rose in cunning juxtaposition with the soft carmine of a blushing cheek? Blue eyes may flash into sudden significance under a knot of azure ribbon, that had before languished their tenderest in vain. Saucy innocence may triumph beneath a shepherdess wreath; or tired charms kindle into new brilliancy stimulated by the consciousness of the perfect inspiration. In fine, all that life holds best is at the mercy of the mantua maker where the Lady of Fashion is concerned. Let but a clever business woman grasp this great and awful truth; and she who combines the brain that can devise, the taste that never fails, the acumen that knows no hesitation, the finger that is at once light and firm, unerring and ethereal, becomes to her employers a treasure beyond the mines of Golconda!
Such a treasure did Miss Pamela Pounce, with whom these pages are concerned, prove herself to the notedMadame Mirabel of Bond Street. And such an influence, far-reaching and subtle, did she exercise on the lives of theEléganteswho consulted her, with the eager submission and reverence of the believing Greek for his Oracles, though with far other and comfortably practical results!
Miss Pamela Pounce, Goddess of Modes, wasipso factoGoddess of the Machine of Life, deciding, with a lucky toss of ribbons or hitherto undreamt of combination of fallals, the fate of her fair customers, and incidentally that of their Beaux, their lovers and their husbands; my Lady Kilcroney and her lazy, jolly life-loving Lord; dark-browed Susan Verney, who would fain have bent the whole world to her sway as she did her weary Baron; Lady Anne, her sister, still fondly, foolishly in love with her stalwart, countrified Squire, Philip Day; their young sister, the last of the fair Vereker Ladies and the naughtiest, with her tangled love-stories; Mr. Stafford, the once famous Beau, proud of the startling beauty of his excellent, dull, childish wife, and anxious that she should flaunt ità la modewith the best of them; Sir Jasper Standish, the sporting Baronet, who, bereaved of his exquisite, clinging Julia, found himself entangled beyond belief with Miss Pamela Pounce’s ribbons; the noted young actress, Miss Falcon, known as “Fair Fatality,” whose brief life drama was more tragic than any she had enacted for the benefit of the public; the plain Miss Vibart, who found beauty and love and happiness all in a Pounce bandbox; Mistress Molly Lafone, own sister—who would believe it?—to the pearl of ingenuous womanhood, Prue Stafford, Molly Lafone that minx, whom the members of my Lady Kilcroney’s coterie were so unanimously leagued to suppress and exclude, and who, in spite of their efforts contrived to insinuate herself disastrously into all their combinations (was it not under a wreath twisted by Pamela’s long clever fingers that this elegant little adventuress came to her most deserved catastrophe?)—there was not one of them but came under her wand!
But at the same time the arbiter of the fate of others, in the shape of a very human young woman, guided the shuttle of her own destiny, and wove a remarkably pretty design for herself.
Milliners, unlike Oracles and Sybils, have each their personal human span with its joys and fears, pleasures, pains and triumphs. Pamela’s romance ran like a cherry-coloured thread through the warp and woof of those other existences, so far above her, in which her profession had involved her. To show the whole pattern, light and dark, sparkling and deep-hued, flowered, dotted, arabesqued, of this brocade of earthly life, the poorModistemust assume as important a place as that of her clientele.