The Very Worst Thing: Young Ladies and Their True Confessions: 1895

Confidences, Frank Bramley https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/confidences-148536/search/keyword:confidences-frank-bramley

 SOME DILEMMAS

But the Worst One was the Story of the Letters.

They were having a real nice time together, and they had told each other almost all of their private affairs when one of them remarked, as she deftly removed a marshmallow from a hatpin on which she had toasted it, “Look here, girls, I wish you would tell me the very worst thing that ever happened to you.”

“H’m,” replied the plump brunette, “that is easy enough in my own case. It happened the last time I went sleighing with Tom. You see, we quarreled desperately and”—

“Was that it?” slyly put in the tall blond.

“It was not. It was the discovery after I had refused to speak to him that I had lost my handkerchief. We had five miles yet to reach home, and I had a cold anyhow, so you may imagine my sufferings.”

“Mercy on us, that was nothing at all,” groaned the tall blond. “Don’t waste any sympathy on her, girls, but listen to me. I was just starting to dress the other day when Walter sent up a message that he had stopped on his way to the train and wouldn’t I see him for a moment right away? In my haste I got on May’s back hair instead of my own. It is nine shades darker, so you can imagine the effect. The parlor curtains were at the laundry, too, the sun was shining brutally in, and I discovered my mistake in the mantel mirror as I took my seat. Think of it! After he had written a poem, which was almost accepted by a magazine, to my ‘Riotous Golden Hair!’”

“Oh, oh!” groaned the first girl, “that was simply awful! As for me, you know I would perish before I would admire Dora’s sleeves. Well, one night I staid with her and died of envy at her new dark blue waist.”

“The one with sleeves like sublimated sofa pillows?” queried the plump brunette.

“The same. I had on my pink one, but it faded away like a sunrise before hers. I determined to have sleeves like those or fill an early grave, so in the morning I told her that I couldn’t possibly wear my pink waist home in daytime, and she actually loaned me her new one.”

“Even Dora has a good fit sometimes,” said the tall blond.

“M’hm. I went home as fast as I could, took off the waist which I had promised to send right back, and flew to the dressmaker’s with it. She promised to make my new sleeves juts like ‘em, and I was coming peacefully away when whom should I meet on the threshold but Dora herself!”

“Oh, Fan, how awful!”

“It was. Not as bad as it might have been, though, for she had my pink waist in her hand. She had come to have the garniture on it copied. Of course neither of us could say a word, but the one moment in which I knew that I was found out was the most awful of my life. I woke up at night bathed in cold perspiration at the thought of it.”

‘And no wonder,” said the other girls in chorus. “Do have some more marshmallows, dear.”

The melancholy girl with the brown hair heaved a sepulchral sigh: “I am glad to know that other people have woes too. I have mine. George and I quarreled desperately yesterday because he actually said I was flirting with Jim.”

“And were you?” queried the blond.

“Of course not. I denied it indignantly and gave back his ring on the spot. When he was gone, I bundled up his letters, called a messenger and sent them off before I drew breath. Today I discovered that I had by mistake inclosed a lot of Jim’s with them, and now I’m wondering how I’m ever going to explain them away.”

And for a moment there was an awed silence in the room.

Ukiah [CA] Daily Journal 3 May 1895: p. 5

Mrs Daffodil’s Aide-memoire: How, indeed?  Mrs Daffodil, who has seen and abetted a good deal of blackmail in her time in service, always advises burning compromising letters and beating the ashes to powder with a poker. Such trifling precautions may save the recipient from being beaten to a powder by a disgruntled lover with a blunt instrument.

Still, stories about ladies who experience difficulties when entertaining two consecutive gentlemen are so commonplace as to be scarcely worth our sympathy. It is the unprincipled ladies who rush off to their dressmakers to copy a sleeve or a garniture of a rival who truly shock Mrs Daffodil.

Mrs Daffodil invites you to join her on the curiously named “Face-book,” where you will find a feast of fashion hints, fads and fancies, and historical anecdotes

You may read about a sentimental succubus, a vengeful seamstress’s ghost, Victorian mourning gone horribly wrong, and, of course, Mrs Daffodil’s efficient tidying up after a distasteful decapitation in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales.