with the fichu, especially as her curls were long, and almost touched her shoulders.
There was no appeal against Robert’s opinion, therefore his sister was compelled to yield; but she disapproved entirely of the piquant neatness of Caroline’s costume, and the lady-like grace of her appearance: something more solid and homely, she would have considered “beaucoup plus convenable.”
The afternoon was devoted to sewing. Mademoiselle, like most Belgian ladies, was specially skilful with her needle. She by no means thought it waste of time to devote unnumbered hours to fine embroidery, sight-destroying lace-work, marvellous netting and knitting, and, above all, to most elaborate stocking-mending. She would give a day to the mending of two holes in a stocking any time, and think her “mission” nobly fulfilled when she had accomplished it. It was another of Caroline’s troubles to be condemned to learn this foreign style of darning, which was done stitch by stitch so as exactly to imitate the fabric of the stocking itself; a wearifu’ process, but considered by Hortense Gérard, and by her ancestresses before her for long generations back, as one of the first “duties of woman.” She herself had had a needle, cotton, and a fearfully torn stocking put into her hand while she yet wore a child’s coif on her little black head: her “hauts faits” in the darning line had been exhibited to company ere she was six years old, and when she first discovered that Caroline was profoundly ignorant of
