The vases were
straddle-legged and pot-bellied Asiatic shapes. Dragons in bronze and
ivory, sticky-looking faience and glittering majolica, stood in the
corners. Silk embroideries representing the stork--a scrawny bird with
a scalp-lock at the back of its neck, looking like a mosquito when
flying--and porcelain landscapes out of drawing, like a child's first
attempts, peopled by individuals with the expression of having their
hair pulled, hung 'twixt our dados and friezes. Lydia's young-lady
friends gave her their works in oil or water-colors done in a fine,
free-hand style that may one day form a school of its own. Our Chicago
girls are people of _nous_. Their talk is "fluent as the flight of a
swallow:" their manners are delightful--American manners must be
excellent, so many Englishmen marry American girls. Their playing makes
us glad the seven poor strings of the old musicians have been
multiplied to seven times seven: no Chicago girl is a musician unless
she has the masters at her finger-tips. And they are readers too. You
would suppose, judging from the papers, that our Chicagoans are
inordinately fond of reading about the indiscretions of rustic wives,
and are given to a perusal of the news in startling headlines: but such
is not the fact.
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