sin really gone out of her mind at last?

"Never feel that way?" she added, delighting in the havoc she was
making. "You should. It's a wonderful feeling."

Then she drained her second glass, and to the evident relief of all
three, rose to go. How we laughed together, as we sped away in our
taxicab. "It's as well to live up to one's reputation with such people,"
she said, that dear, fantastic Luccia.

_A propos_ that early Parisian adventure, Rosa Bonheur had been one of
Luccia's and Irene's great exemplars, and one might say, in one
particular connection,--heroes. I refer to the great painter's adoption
of masculine costume. Why two unusually pretty young women should burn
to discard the traditional flower-furniture of their sex, in exchange
for the uncouth envelopes of man, is hard to understand. But it was
the day of Mrs. Bloomer, as well as Rosa Bonheur; and earnest young
"intellectuals" among women had a notion, I fancy, that to shake off
their silks and laces was, symbolically, at all events, to shake off the
general disabilities of their sex, and was somehow an assertion of a
mental equality with man. At all events, it was a form of defiance
against their sex's immemorial tyrant, which seems to have appealed to
the imaginations of some young women of the period. Another woman's
weakness to be sternly discarded was that scriptural "glory" of her
hair. That must be ruthlessly lopped. So it is easy to imagine the
horror of such relatives as I have hinted at when our two beautiful
adventuresses returned from Paris, and appeared before their families in
great Spanish cloaks, picturesque, coquettish enough you may be sure,
veiling with some show of discretion those hideous compromises with
trousers invented and worn by the strong-minded Mrs. Bloomer, and
wearing their hair after the manner of Florentine boys. To face one's
family, and to walk New York streets so garbed, must have needed real
courage in those days; yet the two friends did both, and even for
a while accepted persecution for vagaries which for them had the
dead-seriousness of youth.

Passionate young propagandists as they were, they even preferred to
abandon their homes for a while--rather than their bloomers--and, taking
a studio together in New York, started out to earn their own living by
the teaching of art. Those were the days of the really brave women.

But to return to the less abstract topic of the bloomers, I often tease
Luccia and Irene abo