Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 113, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 May 1918 — Little-Hat Lady [ARTICLE]

Little-Hat Lady

By JANE OSBORN

(Copyright, 1918, by the McClure Newspaper Syndicate.) Designing hats for a popular-price wholesale millinery establishment was not Upton Pread’s ideal pf a stalwart, life-sized man’s occupation. Still even young men with that innate feeling for line and color that maVks them —or brands them —as artists before they have had a fair chanCe to determine for themselves whether they wish to follow an artist’s, career or not, have to eat and have to be clothed, and designing women’s hats seemed at the time to be the only opportunity that afforded what PrCad considered a living wage. Getting "fin occasional order for a portrait perhaps was more the sort of thing he had dreamed of, and more the sort of thing his friends expected. but it would not have provided for him a comfortable existence at the Stanley Arms, and Upton Pread found that living at that well-appointed little hotel had advantages that offset the designing of hats. Still Upton did not like to have people "know the nature of his “artistic” work. In the morning after breakfast he got out his drawing board and. shut up tn his Snug little chintz room, he would call into being first the image of heads of fair women, and then, as If by magic, he would summon hats to crown them. Hastily and with quick stroke of his pencil he would sketch the pretty heads and then, with minuteness that made reproduction by a milliner possible, he would portray the hat. Having made some four or five sketches he would, roll them up securely in his portfolio and, after having had luncheon In the hotel dining room, he would sally forth to the millinery establishment, there to deliver his wares. They were not always accepted. In fact, he was expected only to deliver two deslms a day and he made sometimes as many as six. After his visit to the milliner’s he had a good part of the afternoon free —not entirely free, either, for If he elected to go to one of the fashionable indoor ice rinks he always had before him the task of studying the women’s hats, not so much to “get ideas” for designs but to learn —what to him was the hardest lesson—what women thought was becoming. Upton had ideas of his own about beauty in women’s apparel, and often when he made a design that he thought was his masterpiece it was only to have the manager of the millinery establishment push the design aside, declaring that If he put out hats like that his business would be ruined. So Upton would carry back the rejected drawings' and crush them into his waste basket and start afresh the next morning with an effort to surpass his own notions about hats. Upton always worked in secrecy. You see he was not proud of his calling. If the substantial, slow-moving chambermaid happened still to be setting his room to rights when he returned from breakfast, he was loath to get out his drawing things, but lingered over his morning paper or walked idly about his room. One day after she had left the room and he had begun in earnest, there was a knock at his door and, without waiting for Upton to call out “come.” the chambermaid stuck her head In the door. She held a waste basket in her hand. “You don’t make a mistake, sir, do you, and throw away picters you want?” she asked. “Some of these here pretty girl’s heads, I mean, seems ’most too good to throw away.” “Oh. those,” Upton said as the woman held up a crushed and crumpled girl’s head wearing what the day before he had judged one of his best designs only to have it condemned as impossible by the practical millinery manager, “those are rubbish. I just do them —to amuse myself, as it w’ere.” And the chambermaid withdrew, dragging her mop and carpet sweeper after her.

The hat in question was inspired by a mussel shell. Upton had seen hats that were inspired by roses and sweet peas and even by canary birds. That sort of thing was trite. He happened to have a few shells that he had gathered on the sea shore the summer before and treasured for no very good reason, and it occurred to him one day that in the graceful curves of the mussel shell and in its deep, penetrating black with brown, green and blue shadings. he might devise a hat that would be worth desigping. The head he drew for this design was the head of a sea nymph. He always made the faces first to suit the hats —If the hat showed Japanese influence the girl was slightly slant-eyed, if she wore a sombrero she was of Spanish features. The hat was of black silk above with shadings of brown and blue and the lining beneath the brim was of the shimmering gray of the Inside of a mussel shell. Upton really reveled in this hat —only to have It rejected the next day at headquarters, while an insipid little hat of dark blue straw with a cherry dangling at one side was pronounced a “winner.” Upton had not learned his lesson. In another daring mood he designed a hat that he said was Inspired by a German air raid at night, though the millinery manager did not even attempt to see the similarity. He did admit, however, that the design was original and might do for a theatrical J costtrme, but for his purposes—never. And that was consigned to the waste basket, where a few days before had

gone th? mussel-shell hat and on another day a hat'that had been suggested by the coion and shape of a spring ’onion. Upton had had them for dinner the night before and had actually carried one to his room, put It In water and taken his design from life. That also was among the failures. Upton knew that onion hat of his was original. Still some one else must have designed it simultaneously. For a week later as Upton sat at dinner he looked up and there two tablet, M the very pretty golden-brown blonde who dined alone and seemed to have few friends —Upton had seen her often and, ppt. infrequently recalled her face and coloring when summoning up Imaginary models In his room —there, sat the little blonde wearing the onion hat. Yes, It -was eactly like the hat he had designed, with the colors as given in his sketch reproduced exactly. An expert milliner could not have reproduced the sketch more faithfully, and the little blonde was just the model for that hat. Upton was in a fever of excitement. He wanted to tell his friends of the but to do so would have necessitated telling of his own role as a hat designer. Then —and thjs was really too much for Upton’s peace of mind—the little blonde appeared one tempestuous spring night when the rain was pouring outside and the wind could be heard rushing around the window panes—she appeared in the' hat that he had designed when thinking of an airplane raid pt night, and tnthe eyes that seemed all tenderness and mildness under the spring onion hat there was now a haunting look of distress and sorrow. But it was unmistakably Upton’s hat. Then appeared the real masterpiece—the musselshell hat, and this seemed 'to suit the little blonde’s face better even than the others. It was a marvelous hat and it was worn by a wonderful model. Upton noticed the eyes of other diners focussed on it and he realized then his in designing It, though he could not guess how the hat had been made. There was nothing at all striking in the cut or coloring of the hat — in the usual acceptance of the word. That it attracted attention was, Upton knew, simply because it was distinctive.

After that Upton’s models were all alike. The little blonde face haunted him and the millinery manager asked him to try and vary the type of hats he designed. They were all made for the same type of face. Upton begem to lose sleep. It was not so much the mystery of the matter, though it was odd enough to have another person extract ideas from your mind in this way and bring into realization so successfully your thwarted dreams. The thing was that Upton was very much in love with the little blonde and that the little blonde was not absolutely indifferent as to his existence he might have learned to his own satisfaction from the way her eyes dropped to her plate whenever he .looked toward her at dinner. > Finally after she had been wearing the three hats for three weeks he could stand the suspense no longer,, and he bravely followed her out of the' dining room one night, and with the manner of an old friend bade her/ a good evening. Not being repulsed, he sat talking with her in the hotel reception room. Upton was a very direct sort of persojj and even before he sought to solve the mystery he told her that he was more Interested in her than he had ever been in any girl before, and she, sweet, frank child that she was, told him that she was very glad of that, for she lonely in the big city and didn’t know any nice young men. That was encouragement enough even for a faint heart, and Upton’s was not faint. Then Upton spoke of the hats. When he told her that he had designed them, she turned very scarlet and said she didn’t know that it was from his room the chambermaid had got them. She said she had come to the city to study millinery, as the only talent she had ever displayed was that of making her own hats. So she had come and had expected to succeed in the school until she discovered that to begin with the pupils had to draw their own designs of hats and she simply could not draw. She told the chambermaid her troubles because she had no one else to talk to, and was all but decided to return home discouraged when the chambermaid brought her the criimpled drawings from one of the waste baskets. She had taken them to school and passed them off as her own work. It was dishonest but she was eager to succeed. Then she had worked out the designs and she had taken every prize the school offered. One of her hats was going to be sent to the international millinery exhibit—the mussel-shell one. The Instructors were wild over it and a very well-known artist who gave thefn lectures on colors had declared that another was a masterpiece in tones. It suggested an air raid at night, he said, thotigh she couldn’t see how he thought that. “So they are masterpieces, after all.” Upton sighed, and before the evening was far spent they had not ? only settled fill the plans for the Weddffig but were dreaming dreams of starting an exclusive shop In which they would combine their talents. /