Page:A hairdresser's experience in high life.djvu/60

62 poor hair-dresser has not lived in the fashionable world, and presided at the toilets of fashionable women twenty years, without having well ascertained this fact. Women, to be sure, are often imposed upon, but it can not be denied that the husbands of fashionable women are too often the most to-be-pitied-wretches that walk the earth. Mrs. W. had a hundred and fifty dresses, and made five toilets a day. Wretched slave that she was to fashion! For four successive seasons I dressed her hair, and each year she became more and more disagreeable, from a frantic desire to obtain a standing in fashionable circles, which, from some cause or other, was always a failure with her. Not that her dress was not elegant, her jewels her own (a great desideratum), her conduct perfectly proper, so far as the world could judge; but her efforts were two perceptible to succeed with the ladies, and her waist too small for the tastes of the gentlemen. She could not be the married belle she aimed at, and this was gall and bitterness to her heart. But as I said before, the ladies rule the day everywhere, and Mrs. W did not take with the ladies. This was her downfall. Undoubtedly the gentlemen would have paid her attention, but at Saratoga the gentlemen of the higher circles dare not make a movement outside of the charmed coterie to which they have been admitted; they are slaves to certain female leaders, and, if I were not a poor hair-dresser, I would not hesitate to say they are cowards under petticoat government. They dare not pay attention to a lady out of a particular set, for fear of being black-balled no matter how meritorious the lady may be, and this is a well understood thing at Saratoga. But gentlemen