Even the passion which he felt while he surveyed her,
foreign as it was to those legitimate emotions which her ambition
and her genius would equally have tended to inspire in any
justly-minded nature, might well be considered frigid--regarded as
the result of deliberate artifice--the true offspring of an habitual
and base indulgence.
It was to meet this unsophisticated, impassioned, and confiding
girl, that Alfred Stevens bestowed such particular pains on his
costume. He felt its deficiencies, and, accordingly, the necessity
of making the most of it; for, though he perfectly well knew that
such a woman as Margaret Cooper would have been the very last to
regard the mere garment in which a congenial nature is arrayed,
yet he also well knew that the costume is not less indicative of
the tastes than the wealth of the wearer. You will see thousands
of persons, men and women, richly dressed, and but one will be WELL
dressed: that one, most generally, will be the individual who is
perhaps of all others possessed of the least resources for dress,
other than those which dwell in the well-arranged mind, the
well-disposing taste, and the happy, crowning fancy.
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