Making believe be what you are not is the essence of vulgarity.  Show over dirt is the one attribute of vulgar people.  If any man can walk behind one of these women and see what she rakes up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he has got a tough stomach.  I wouldn’t let one of ’em into my room without serving ’em as David served Saul at the cave in the wilderness,—­cut off his skirts, Sir! cut off his skirts!

I suggested, that I had seen some pretty stylish ladies who offended in the way he condemned.

Stylish women, I don’t doubt,—­said the Little Gentleman.—­Don’t tell me that a true lady ever sacrifices the duty of keeping all about her sweet and clean to the wish of making a vulgar show.  I won’t believe it of a lady.  There are some things that no fashion has any right to touch, and cleanliness is one of those things.  If a woman wishes to show that her husband or her father has got money, which she wants and means to spend, but doesn’t know how, let her buy a yard or two of silk and pin it to her dress when she goes out to walk, but let her unpin it before she goes into the house;—­there may be poor women that will think it worth disinfecting.  It is an insult to a respectable laundress to carry such things into a house for her to deal with.  I don’t like the Bloomers any too well,—­in fact, I never saw but one, and she—­or he, or it—­had a mob of boys after her, or whatever you call the creature, as if she had been a-----

The Little Gentleman stopped short,—­flushed somewhat, and looked round with that involuntary, suspicious glance which the subjects of any bodily misfortune are very apt to cast round them.  His eye wandered over the company, none of whom, excepting myself and one other, had, probably, noticed the movement.  They fell at last on Iris,—­his next neighbor, you remember.

—­We know in a moment, on looking suddenly at a person, if that person’s eyes have been fixed on us.

Sometimes we are conscious of it before we turn so as to see the person.  Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice, of love, leak out in this way.  There is no need of Mrs. Felix Lorraine’s reflection in the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting evil for us behind our backs.  We know it, as we know by the ominous stillness of a child that some mischief or other is going-on.  A young girl betrays, in a moment, that her eyes have been feeding on the face where you find them fixed, and not merely brushing over it with their pencils of blue or brown light.

A certain involuntary adjustment assimilates us, you may also observe, to that upon which we look.  Roses redden the cheeks of her who stoops to gather them, and buttercups turn little people’s chins yellow.  When we look at a vast landscape, our chests expand as if we would enlarge to fill it.  When we examine a minute object, we naturally contract, not only our foreheads, but all our dimensions.  If I see two men wrestling, I wrestle too, with my