They
were brilliantly, even fantastically dressed, the men as fancifully as
the women, for the sobering influence of the Puritan conception of
dignity upon masculine dress had long since passed away. The hair of the
men, too, though it was rarely worn long, was commonly curled in a
manner that suggested the barber, and baldness had vanished from the
earth. Frizzy straight-cut masses that would have charmed Rossetti
abounded, and one gentleman, who was pointed out to Graham under the
mysterious title of an "amorist," wore his hair in two becoming plaits _a
la_ Marguerite. The pigtail was in evidence; it would seem that citizens
of Chinese extraction were no longer ashamed of their race. There was
little uniformity of fashion apparent in the forms of clothing worn. The
more shapely men displayed their symmetry in trunk hose, and here were
puffs and slashes, and there a cloak and there a robe. The fashions of
the days of Leo the Tenth were perhaps the prevailing influence, but the
aesthetic conceptions of the far east were also patent. Masculine
embonpoint, which, in Victorian times, would have been subjected to the
buttoned perils, the ruthless exaggeration of tight-legged tight-armed
evening dress, now formed but the basis of a wealth of dignity and
drooping folds. Graceful slenderness abounded also. To Graham, a
typically stiff man from a typically stiff period, not only did these men
seem altogether too graceful in person, but altogether too expressive in
their vividly expressive faces.
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