XII.

  Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy.
       Shakespeare.

And now, Esmeralda, having determined to put your master’s advice into practice and to “keep riding,” you think that you must have a habit in order to be ready to take to the road whenever you have an opportunity, and to be able to accompany Theodore, should he desire to repeat your music-ride?  And you would like to know just what it will cost, and everything about it?  And first, what color can you have?

You “can” have any color, Esmeralda, and you “can” have any material, for that matter.  Queen Guinevere wore grass green silk, and if her skirt were as long as those worn by Matilda of Flanders, Norman William’s wife, centuries after, her women must have spent several hours daily in mending it, unless she had a new habit for every ride, or unless the English forest roads were wider than they are to-day.  But all the ladies of Arthur’s court seem to have ridden in their ordinary dress.  Enid, for instance, was arrayed in the faded silk which had been her house-dress and waking-dress in girlhood, when she performed her little feat of guiding six armor-laden horses.  Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart seem to have liked velvet, either green or black, and to have adorned it with gold lace, and both probably took their fashions form France; the young woman in the Scotch ballad was “all in cramoisie”; Kate Peyton wore scarlet broadcloth, but secretly longed for purple, having been told by a rival, who had probably found her too pretty for scarlet, that green or purple was “her color.”

There are crimson velvet and dark blue velvet and Lincoln green velvet habits without end in fiction, and in the records of English royal wardrobes, but, beautiful as velvet is, and exquisitely becoming as it would be, you would better not indulge your artistic taste by wearing it.  It would cost almost three times as much as cloth; it would be nearly impossible to make a well fitting modern skirt of it, and it would be worn into ugliness by a very few hours of trotting.  Be thankful, therefore, that fashion says that woollen cloth is the most costly material that may be used.

In India, during the last two or three seasons, Englishwomen have worn London-made habits of very light stuffs, mohairs and fine Bradford woollens, and there is no reason why any American woman should not do the same.  In Hyde Park, for three summers, in those early morning hours when some of the best riders go, attended by a groom, to enjoy something more lively than the afternoon parade, skirts of light tweed and covert coats of the same material worn over white silk shirts, with linen collars and a man’s tie, have made their wearers look cool and comfortable, and duck covert jackets, with ordinary woollen skirts have had a similar effect, but American women have rather hesitated as to adopting these fashions, lest some one, beholding, should say that they were not correct.  Thus did they once think that they must wear bonnets with strings in church, no matter what remonstrance was made by the thermometer, or how surely they were deafened to psalm and sermon by longing for the cool, comfortable hats, which certain wise persons had decided were too frivolous for the sanctuary.