A propos that early Parisian adventure, Rosa Bonheur had been one of Luccia’s and Irene’s great exemplars, and one might say, in one particular connection,—­heroes.  I refer to the great painter’s adoption of masculine costume.  Why two unusually pretty young women should burn to discard the traditional flower-furniture of their sex, in exchange for the uncouth envelopes of man, is hard to understand.  But it was the day of Mrs. Bloomer, as well as Rosa Bonheur; and earnest young “intellectuals” among women had a notion, I fancy, that to shake off their silks and laces was, symbolically, at all events, to shake off the general disabilities of their sex, and was somehow an assertion of a mental equality with man.  At all events, it was a form of defiance against their sex’s immemorial tyrant, which seems to have appealed to the imaginations of some young women of the period.  Another woman’s weakness to be sternly discarded was that scriptural “glory” of her hair.  That must be ruthlessly lopped.  So it is easy to imagine the horror of such relatives as I have hinted at when our two beautiful adventuresses returned from Paris, and appeared before their families in great Spanish cloaks, picturesque, coquettish enough you may be sure, veiling with some show of discretion those hideous compromises with trousers invented and worn by the strong-minded Mrs. Bloomer, and wearing their hair after the manner of Florentine boys.  To face one’s family, and to walk New York streets so garbed, must have needed real courage in those days; yet the two friends did both, and even for a while accepted persecution for vagaries which for them had the dead-seriousness of youth.

Passionate young propagandists as they were, they even preferred to abandon their homes for a while—­rather than their bloomers—­and, taking a studio together in New York, started out to earn their own living by the teaching of art.  Those were the days of the really brave women.

But to return to the less abstract topic of the bloomers, I often tease Luccia and Irene about them, seeking for further information as to why they ever came to retrograde from a position so heroically taken, one of such serious import to human progress, and to condescend once more to don the livery of feminine servitude, and appear, as they do today, in delicate draperies which the eye searches in vain for any hint of sanguinary revolution.  Luccia always looks shamefaced at the question.  She still feels guilty, I can see, of a traitorous backsliding and occasionally threatens to make up for it by a return to masculine costume—­looking the most exquisite piece of Dresden china as she says it.  I have seen that masculine tyrant of hers smiling knowingly to himself on such occasions, and it has not been difficult to guess why and when those historic bloomers disappeared into the limbo of lost causes.  There is little doubt that when Love came in by the door, the bloomers went out, so to speak, by the window.