While the majority of the customers at the store were well-dressed
women, there were many who came to buy hats who looked poor and
pinched. A few looked slatternly.
A sudden swing of their dress skirts would disclose a badly frayed
petticoat or a tattered stocking showing above the shabby shoe. Their
gloveless hands were red and cold and coarse, and the milliner told the
clerk that she dreaded to have them handle her filmy laces or
glistening satins, because their rough fingers stuck to the delicate
fabrics and injured them.
These poor women worked hard, early and late. Beyond the barest
necessities they had little to spare, and yet not a woman among them
would have bought an unfashionable or out-of-date hat could she have
had it at one quarter the price. Feathers were fashionable, and
feathers she must have. Might not one "as well be out of the world as
out of the fashion"?
All this dreadful traffic in my murdered comrades, and their display in
the glass cases as well as on the heads of the customers, naturally
made me very sad, and I now looked with aversion at every woman who
entered the store. But that all were not heartless fiends who were
robed in feminine garb I found out another day when a daintily dressed
lady came in to purchase a winter hat.
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