Two questions and a short story on the Letters page this month:

• Zeina inquires about how to make a set of the 1660 watered silk stays from the V&A.
• Bernicia wonders about European sources of colored grommets
• A short story from 1913, in which the lady's undergarments play a starring role (it's a nice clean story, nothing risque actually happens!)

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with your questions, letters and advice by April 1st, 2010 for next month's column.

  The Toe from The toe: and other tales By Alexander Harvey

As she dressed with punctilious care before the cheval glass in her bed-room, it amazed Helen that she, a wife, could prepare for a guilty hour with a lover in so matter-of-fact a mood. Sin, she reflected, drawing the sheer silk of her open-work blue stockings across her cheek, must be like everything else in life. To be false to her marriage vows—how tremendous and melodramatic such a thing had appeared but a few weeks back! That was before Jack Marmaduke had forced her lips against his own while with flashing eyes she cried: "Sir!"

No doubt her husband would kill Jack if ever exposure came. Even that prospect did not seem shocking to Helen. She was astonished to find how interested she had become in the hand embroidery of her chemise, lying daintily on the bed.

She tried hard to think of monogamy as the basis of Western civilization, only to have her vagrant mind wander back to her own rounded bust reflected so tenderly in the glass before her. But time was pressing. Her rendezvous with Jack was for three o'clock that very afternoon. The miniature golden timepiece on her dressing-table chimed the approach of that guilty hour. What a wealth of underwear was sprawled over the bed in masses of lace edging, soft-finish nainsook and French lawn! Jack, she knew instinctively, was a Sybarite, an adept in the technique of sin. She had read a popular novel once about a wicked but fascinating Justice of the United States Supreme Court whose delight it was to kiss his mistresses between the shoulder blades. Jack would, no doubt, kiss her between the shoulder blades—a thing her husband, the famous biologist, never did. Well, she would deck herself for this sin as if it were a consecration in lingerie. And was it sin, after all? Was not the old ethic exploded in this age of radium emanations and wireless telegraphy?

The fine nainsook on her bed, with its wealth of Valenciennes lace, of sheer lawn, of white silk ribbons, seemed to cry aloud that her affair with Jack would have its beauty. Never could she prepare to meet her husband, upon his return from a lecture tour through the West, in this aesthetic way. That dainty and fussy silk petticoat, with its deep flounces and its inserted gores of plaited silk —what an ecstasy it promised! Oh, she would be a dainty thing to step into a paramour's arms. And she, a Puritan in every fiber, as she supposed, was not shocked. That seemed very odd. Perhaps, after all, sin was not the thing of sex she had been trained from girlhood to surmise. 

This tremendous event had come into Helen's life at a time when American women were wearing very little in the way of underwear and reading a great deal in the way of Ibsen. Her lingerie and her literature were of the thinnest and lightest. Helen's husband stinted her in nothing. Her surplice corset cover was developed through exquisite flouncing. With it that afternoon she would wear a five-gored petticoat in round length so that when she stepped out of the tailored directoire gown her attitude might be sacerdotal in its dignity. Her meeting with Jack was to be no less sacred than the frenzy of a Delphic priestess.

Les Dessous Elegants, March 1912

Helen had taken no risks with the corset cover. It had soft, indefinite, lacy effects. Two rows of edging, joined with beading, formed the shoulder straps. Helen was cunning enough to realize that one cannot get a well-fitting corset cover by gathering in the entire fullness at the back and in the front. Her device was to slant it at the under-arm as if it were a waist. This made the garment conform to the lines of her figure, which she well knew had inspired in Jack the longing of Tereus for Procne. She understood how to dress as thoroughly as Napoleon understood how to outflank Mack at Ulm.

Helen strove to fix her thoughts upon Voltaire's views of God as she took the lattice ribbon corset from its repose upon her bed, scanning it critically. Is the human mind duplex, she asked herself, and can a beautiful wife contemplate a pair of stays made expressly for her own slender figure —lighter in weight than anything of the sort in a varied experience of these cunningly boned creations—while meditating upon her own cosmopolitan soul? It must be so. Helen wondered at the tendency of her mind, while pondering the circumstance that a corset should be unlaced to its fullest extent before being put on, to take refuge in enthusiasm for Rousseau against the thought of her husband. She was trying to be shocked and was failing.

She sighed as she hooked the corset at the bottom first and then hooked the top. Having hooked the top, she undid the bottom and hooked the corset all the way down, resolving as she did so to read Nietzsche every night of the sinful life she was beginning. How childish her delight, she reflected, in the thing of white silk now shaping itself in pink ribbon daintiness about her waist line. To think that a waist line had had more to do with the course of human history under the Roman Emperors than even economic determinism! She resolved to discuss that theme with the brilliant young Socialist who sneered at marriage so poetically and whom she had encountered at a woman suffragist debate a few weeks ago. Did he, too, kiss women between the shoulder blades in these revolutionary times?

She stood erect before the mirror that she might be more at ease in adjusting the corset well down, with lacings loose, while she worked her trim figure up until it fitted in well over the hips. At last she began her snug lacing at the waist line and then laced above and below, not without a fleeting thought of the proletariat in Odessa, for Helen was above all else a woman of comprehensive sympathies—what is known nowadays as an intellectual.

At no stage of these proceedings did she lose her odd sense of not being shocked at all. She was not overwhelmed by any consciousness of sin. She did not even think of Jack, not even of her husband. She was thinking only of a low bust, of a flat back, of small hips, as the essentials of womanhood. Sex is in these things. Did her husband, in his learned monographs on the behavior of the lower organisms, ever pause to ask how the forces of sex in the primitive protoplasm of unicellular creatures had evolved a tailored waist, round and slightly accentuated at the hips, with a straight, flat, unbroken line down the front of a paneled skirt? What biological principle could be behind the circumstance that for a woman with a well-developed figure a plain, tightfitting corset cover is the most useful thing on earth? Did Madame Roland, Helen asked herself, think of her bust when she stood beneath that statue of Liberty and uttered that immortal apostrophe? That agonizing but suave curve from the shoulder to the top of the bust of Madame Roland—what could it mean but a good corset? Nay, was not the cause of woman in the wonderful twentieth century bound up in some subtle way with that lovely, straight line from the chin to the knees which made the ladies' tailors allies, without realizing it, in a great struggle between the sexes? Had Mary Wollstonecraft, with all her genius, achieved as much for woman as one well-made corset?

How time was flying! She was to meet Jack at a station of the subway far up town. She walked as far as Forty-second street, feeling, she said to herself reproachfully, far prouder of those suave curves at her hip and shoulder than she ever could of the intimacy she had gained with Nietzsche. Helen wondered, as she bought her ticket at the little booth, whether the Superwoman would be long-waisted. It was fully ten minutes to three by the time Helen had arrived at that station of the subway from which she and her lover were to proceed to the scene of their sin. Jack was nowhere in sight. She had made him promise to get to the uptown station precisely at three, not a minute before. She did not want to alight from a train in the subway only to be accosted by a man who had obviously been awaiting her.

A feeling of annoyance brought a flush to Helen's cheek as she realized how precipitate she had been. It was quite impossible for a woman of Helen's inexpressibly elegant appearance to linger ten minutes in a subway station. There was no alternative but to make her way above to the street. There she might find some tea-room or department store to kill the hateful minutes in. She emerged into the sunlight and made for the first soda water fountain that offered itself.

Eight minutes to three! The soda water fountain was besieged by impatient throngs of that class of women who have never heard of a Nietzsche, never read an Ibsen. What was biology to that fat woman pouring liquid chocolate into her frightful gullet? Helen sighed as she bought a ten-cent ticket from the cashier and seated herself upon a hard, high stool. She kicked her well-shod and tiny foot against the counter in sheer vexation. She turned cold with horror the next moment, for the impatient movement had forced her toe right through the silken texture of her stocking. This was an accident to which Helen was peculiarly liable. It was her habit to wear open-work silk stockings just a size too small for her feet. She loved the feeling of pressure that went with silk stretched to the utmost and she was excessively proud of a foot so small as to make a sensation whenever she did a tango.

There was no mistaking the familiar feeling. Her toe was right through her stocking. Helen appreciated fully all that could be implied in Jack's resolve, when they were alone, to unbutton her dainty footwear with his own strong, brown hands. He would essay to press her foot to his lips. He had said as much when this meeting was arranged. And he would see that toe sticking through that stocking. What an anti-climax—an occasion too sacred, too serious for words, transformed in a trice by mere accident into something light, irresponsible. She would not be a queen stepping down from an etherial regality into a reverent lover's arms, but a wife laughing with her paramour over a hole in her stocking.

Helen felt a fine perspiration breaking out all over her. She drank the mixture set before her and fled as far from the subway as she could. She did not dare look towards the kiosk that led below the street level, lest Jack's form should loom there.

Her social peril, the narrow escape she had had from the most compromising possibility a civilized woman can face, and ever so many considerations allied to these filled her brain as she hailed a taxicab and was whirled back to her husband's home. Never, she told herself, could she seize again that first fine careless rapture at the thought of ascertaining just what life, real life, was like. The double standard of morals, the possibility of enlarging the narrowness of woman's existence by tasting the flavor of man's experience, would be associated in her mind hereafter, not with George Sand and Mary Wollstonecraft, but with a hole in her stocking. The subject had been hurled over the line that sunders sublimity from the absurd. Had her husband seen that toe protruding through the hole in her stocking, the episode would have been delightful. They would have had a merry laugh over it together.

As the taxicab halted before her husband's door, the significance of the adventure she had just lived through flashed upon Helen's more composed mind. She had run against the bulwarks of monogamy when she thrust her toe through her stocking. A woman could confront her husband without loss of prestige or of her moral ascendancy after such an accident. But she could not face a lover with dignity. The psychology of this, Helen felt, was subtle. The things that tell against monogamy are great things, to be sure—the hunger of the heart for perfect love, the soul that finds itself understood when the ideal mate arrives at last, the supremely human impulse, and the revolt of the intellect against the slavery of tradition.

These, and things like these, tell against monogamy.

Working for it are the little things—the feeling of ease in one's world, the need of a life in harmony with that of narrow minds, the conventions, the financial obligations and even the holes that are worn in one's stockings. There are, after all, but a few great things. There are, after all, so many little things. And this world is made for the little things, the little minds, the little lives, the little spirits, the little matings. Ah! the wonder is not that monogamy survives but that anyone can resist it and survive. The things making for monogamy belong to what Bismarck called the imponderabilia, but their influence must have been immense during that long, prehistoric period in which man was toiling up the slope that led from life in tree-tops to a civilization that encased the feminine limb in stockings of the sheerest silk. Not that primitive women thrust their toes through stockings and thus arrived at monogamy. There was in their time some other force or circumstance working for monogamy. But whatever it was, Helen refleeted, as she paid for the taxicab, it induced in the female of our species the feeling that whatever happened a wife must be true to her husband. Helen let herself in at the front door with a profound reverence for the seventh commandment.

The toe: and other tales by Alexander Harvey (US Google Books)

Les Dessous Elegants catalogue, 1912

Spirella Corsets, 1913 Catalogue

A dream of fair women, illustrated by Harrison Fisher (1907)