The Magic Skirt
There was once a lady, sober in mind and sedate in manner, whose plain dress exactly represented her desire to be inconspicuous, to do good, to improve every day of her life in actions that should benefit her kind. She was a serious person, and she had a distaste for the gay society which was mainly a flutter of ribbons and talk and pretty faces; and when she meditated, as she did in her spare moments, her heart was sore over the frivolity of life and the emptiness of fashion. She longed to make the world better, and without any priggishness she set it an example of simplicity and sobriety, of cheerful acquiescence in plainness and inconspicuousness.
One day–it was in the autumn–this lady had occasion to buy a new skirt . From a great number offered to her she selected a bright colored one with floral prints. It did not match with the rest of her apparel; it did not fit her apparent character. What impulse led to this selection she could not explain. She was not tired of being good, but something in the texture of the skirt and the color pleased her. If it were a temptation, she did not intend to yield to it, but she thought she would take the skirt home and try it. Perhaps her nature felt the need of a little warmth. The skirt pleased her still more when she got it home and put it on and surveyed herself in the mirror. Indeed, there was a new expression in her face that corresponded to the skirt. She looked at it. There was something almost humanly winning and temptatious in it. In short, she kept it, and when she wore it abroad she was not conscious of its incongruity to herself, but of the incongruity of the rest of her apparel to the skirt, which seemed to have a sort of intelligence of its own, at least a power of changing and conforming things to itself. By degrees one article after another in the lady’s wardrobe was laid aside, and another substituted for it that answered to the demanding spirit of the skirt. In a little while this plain lady was not plain any more, but most gorgeously dressed, and possessed with the desire to be in the height of the fashion.
