It was "different" and yet not "queer," it was artistic and yet
fashionable, and with its flowing lines it would not be hard to
construct. It was the creation of a Parisian boulevard actress, known
widely for her costumes, for the extraordinary manner in which she
dressed her hair, and for the rapidity of her succeeding emotional
entanglements. Her name meant nothing to Sylvia. She tore out the
page, folded it, and put it for safe-keeping between the pages of her
text-book on Logic.
That afternoon she began work on it, running the long seams up on the
machine with whirring rapidity, acutely aware of her mother's silent,
uncommenting passage back and forth through the sewing-room. With an
impulse of secrecy which she did not analyze, she did the trying-on in
her own room, craning and turning about before her own small mirror.
She knew that her mother would think the dress was cut too low,
although, as she told herself, looking with complacency at the smooth,
white, exquisitely fine-grained skin thus disclosed, it wasn't nearly
as low cut as the dresses Eleanor Hubert wore to any little dance. She
had long felt it to be countrified in the extreme to wear the mild
compromises towards evening-dress which she and most of the State
University girls adopted, as compared with the frankly disclosing
gowns of the "town girls" whose clothes came from Chicago and New
York.
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