A REDUCED GENTLEWOMAN.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VII, Issue 11, 14 March 1891, Page 3

A REDUCED GENTLEWOMAN.

SHE is a dainty little gentlewoman— *an unappropriated blessing ’ seventy years old. Once she was rich and lived in swelldom and had her maids to serve her and a eoachnian and a carriage. She graduated as a winsome belle, gladsome and gracious and the dispenser of many joy-giving hospitalities. Lacking the prudent genius of financiering, after her parents died, one way and another she lost a great deal of money, and one day she realised with keen foreboding that she was almost alone in this big world with very little to keep her from starvation. She was only learned in gracious household ways, which are of little money value in the practical work-a-day worlds She finally invested her bit of money in goods, hoping to make a living by * keeping shop. ’ She established herself in a quiet street and for a time her enterprise succeeded, but gradually the large stores grew more attractive and the street less desirable Jor the better class of people, and the little old lady was fqrgotten, awl the problem of getting a living was harder to solve than before.

The shop began to look seedy and empty and the storekeeper’s courage was almost gone when one day a child came in to buy ‘the doll in the shoe.’ It was a rag doll with a group of gay pigmies about it— * the old woman in the shoe ’—which a kind friend had made for her window when she first opened the store. She was glad to sell it now, but soon replaced it with another, which was also sold, and so on till the worrying problem of how to earn her bread solved itself in this happy, providential way, and she decided to make rag dolls for a Jiving. Her aged sister sewed the dresses on the machine until she had the‘oldfashioned rheumatism ’ so badly she could do nothing, and a helper had to be hired to do them.

The dolls are very cute and chic, notwithstanding they are made of stout corset jean stuffed with cotton and dressed in simple wash calico, but the dresses are pretty and so are the coquettish bonnets made of the same material. A dainty bit of lace at the neck and sleeves, and artistic touches here and there, add an air of delicacy to the rig, which tells in a subtle yet convincing way that long ago the cheery little gentlewoman delighted in pretty femininities of exquisite style and of texture dainty and sheer. At the Mutual Benefit and Exchange for Woman’s Work the aged maiden called the ‘ cheery little doll woman,’ and the name suits her signally well. She had no misgivings, no repinings, and like a true little gentlewoman that she is, never refers to the ‘ days when she was better off.’ Her only worry—a great one to her—is to get clothes for her rag dolls. This question absorbs her thoughts more than anything else, and she has to buy with exacting judgment and cut her cloth with close economy. In her sunny personality one forgets how pathetic her life history is. To be making rag dolls in a dismal, sunless, stuffy little store in a forlorn, uninviting by-street at the age of seventy is a heartaching contrast to the time when she was cosily housed in luxurious surroundings not far off some fifty years ago. This story is but one of the many pathetic histories of struggles to earn a living, told to the philanthropic women at the ‘ Mutual Benefit and Exchange for Woman’s Work,’ where the strugglers seem to unburden themselves more freely than anywhere else.