Side by side with the Women's Institutes' display, the Building Centre in Bond Street has been show-of course from a society columnist, not on this occasion being in the party myself.) It is said to have measured 15 yards round the hem. With tiara, necklace and bracelets of large diamonds, her Majesty must indeed have been a brilliant figure. She wore another crinoline at the return banquet given by King Carol at the Rumanian Legation. The results are quickly seen in the snapshots since published of ladies of rank and fashion also appearing in crinolines, In Paris, one gathers, the Queen's lead has been followed with the deepest interest. Articles are published to explain that the modern Crinolines are constructed on a new design enabling them to fit without disarray or damage into motor cars. But one would think that depends on the size of the car. It is strongly emphasized that the crinoline demands a special gait in walking. As Lewis Carroll nearly wrote In it you must contrive to glide, And gently sway from side to side; Her Majesty can do it.
And, as the Parisian papers gallantly say, the Queen ufiderstands exactly how to excute the short shuffling footsteps which make the crinoline undulate in the correct billowy way. But this is only to emphasize once again, as with Gainsborough hats or Edwardian hairdressing, that if you revive old modes, you must cultivate old manners. Fashion must give way to deportment. seemed very low prices, showy-looking sets which fall to pieces long before the instalment money is paid oft.
Furniture, and housing, remind one that early in December we shall be observing the centenary of that splendid woman pioneer, Octavia Hill. To the modern generation she is little more than a name, if even to many of them so much as that. Yet no one has done more for the reform of houses of the working class The daughter of a Wisbech banker, she was one of the first to realize that bad housing breeds bad habits. In 1864 she borrowed money from Ruskin and with it bought three houses in which she set out to demonstrate that working-class people can be housed, not only "wholesomely, but even to a modest extent artistically, at rents which will pay a fair return. In the exhibition of Octavia Hill relics, which is being arranged for her centenary, nothing is more interesting than her reports on the hideous conditions under which vast masses of the lower orders lived a century or less ago. You may see what those conditions were in such novels as "Sybil" and "Mary Barton."
The ideals for which Octavia Hill fought have been realized today in the splendid workmen's dwellings to be seen on Millbank, in St. Pancras and elsewhere. But the struggle against slums, ardently as it is pursued by many public bodies today, contains new difficulties, the chief of which is the reluctance of the inmates to go away from the neighbourhood of their work.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.