For Lady Powell-Carewe was
a creative artist, taking her ideas where she found them in art
or nature, and in revivals and in inventions. She took her color
schemes from paintings, old and new, from jewels, landscapes. It
was said that she went to Niagara to study the floods of color that
tumble over its brink.
She began to interest herself in Kedzie, to wish to accomplish more
than the mere selling of dress goods made up. She decided to create
Kedzie as well as her clothes.
"Do you wear that pout all the time?" she asked.
"Do I pout?" Kedzie asked, in an amazement.
"Don't pretend that you don't know it and do it intentionally. Also
why do you Americans always answer a question by asking another?"
"Do we?" said Kedzie.
Lady Powell-Carewe decided that Kedzie was as short on brains as
she was long on looks. But it was the looks that Lady Powell-Carewe
was going to dress, and not the brains.
She ordered Kedzie to spend a lot of money having her hair cared
for expertly.
She tried various styles on Kedzie, ordering her to throw off her
frock and stand in her combination while Mrs. Congdon and Mr.
Charles brought up armloads of silks and velvets and draped them
on Kedzie as if she were a clothes-horse.
The feel of the crisp and whispering taffetas, the elevation of
the brocades, the warm nothingness of the chiffons like wisps
of fog, the rich dignity of the cloths, gave Kedzie rapture on
rapture. Standing there with a burden of fabrics upon her and Lady
Powell-Carewe kneeling at her feet pinning them up and tucking them
here and there, Kedzie was reminded of those ancient days of six
months gone when her mother used to kneel about her and fit on her
the home-made school-dress cut according to Butterick patterns.
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