Violet

Future scholars of the better florists of Edwardian London may well be indebted to Violet W. Stevenson, whose Successful Flower Marketing and The Encyclopaedia of Floristry, though published respectively in 1952 and 1954 by W. H. Collingridge Limited and Transatlantic Arts Incorporated, appear to codify many practices that must have been firmly established fifty years earlier. Miss Stevenson’s style is brisk, sensible, and businesslike. Aesthetic judgments are cautious but firm, her emphases generally technical: for instance, one is struck by the elaborateness and sheer number of fiddly processes of wiring, indeed the enormous quantity of wire that went into every arrangement and bouquet—nine different gauges in various lengths, on reels, and in coils used for many different purposes such as strengthening stems, straightening leaves, and preventing blooms from disintegrating prematurely. All of this is reminiscent of the ostrich-feather industry, which was similarly wire dependent. Miss Stevenson’s business was obviously geared towards furnishing “shower bouquets” for weddings as opposed to presentations at Court, though the finished articles themselves must have been pretty much identical, a froth of blooms and wispy ferns that could easily descend as far as the hem, if not farther. By the 1950s tuberoses had gone out of fashion, presumably absorbed by the booming postwar fragrance industry, though wartime austerities must surely have played their part. The article on gladioli is somewhat surprising, commending as it does their usefulness in creating enormous corsage ornaments, as well as structuring bouquets and sheaves around them. Imagine the size of a corsage ornament consisting of a couple of thrusting glads. No doubt this fashion was the target of Barry Humphries’s 1955 creation of Mrs. Everage. “It should not be assumed,” writes Miss Stevenson, “that grasses are only permissible in Victorian floristry. Modern designs lend themselves quite well to certain varieties of grass, not the quaking grass of our grandmothers but the bolder, water-grass, eryanthus, wheat and barley. Most of these are obtainable from the [horticultural] sundriesman in their natural colours, bleached or dyed.” According to the OED, quaking grass, n., is “any of various grasses of the genus Briza, having broad, flattened spikelets dangling on slender stalks which tremble in the breeze; esp. (more fully common quaking grass) B. media, which is widely distributed in Eurasia,” and was therefore, of course, ideal for the sort of tremulous shower bouquets that we have seen in considerable abundance at the glittering evening Courts of King Edward and Queen Alexandra at Buckingham Palace.

As one might expect, Miss Stevenson’s mini-dissertation on color rewards close inspection. “The development of colour consciousness,” she writes, “and the true appreciation of colour harmony is an essential qualification for the would-be successful florist,” and their under-development, by implication, almost a guarantee of failure. “There is often so little regard to the suitability of certain colour combinations that far too many floral designs appear to have been assembled with little or no thought of colour harmony...It is not enough to say that the hue of one flower never clashes with another unless you embrace the whole subject and go on to add, when sufficient green is present in stem and foliage to act as a buffer between each colour and the next. No florist can afford to disregard the value of green. It is an important ingredient in floral colour harmonies.” Miss Stevenson does tend to state identical points twice in neighboring sentences, for emphasis. She goes on to recite the standard line on primaries, secondaries, and complimentaries in the color spectrum; the distinctions between hue and tone, shade and tint, pure and “broken” colors, and between contrasting and analogous two- and three-color harmonies. She warns against unfortunate stridency or the jarring effect of ill-conceived adjacencies, and suggests ingenious methods of re-introducing softness and/or pallor. Here, I think, we may identify the point at which Miss Stevenson diverges from her Edwardian predecessors, for not long ago we observed that for them no color combination was too riotous, no effect of texture too assertive or forceful, and no shape or assemblage disproportionate in scale, on the contrary. Wisely, however, Miss Stevenson advises against coronet and veil ornaments composed of lilies, daisies, or daffodils (!), recommending instead “waxy, white flowers, such as stephanotis, gardenias, or camellias, that have about them a slight air of luxury.” And it is back to luxury that this curiously neglected branch of London commerce invariably leads us.

Florists, finally.

If presentation at Court furnished the most socially advantageous and lucrative branch of the Edwardian retail flower trade, its bread-and-butter were weddings, funerals, and the theater. I suspect that middle-level retailers throughout the empire were rather more closely wedded to the latter than has hitherto been fully grasped. In Perth, Western Australia, for example, considerable excitement was aroused by the Anderson Theatrical Company’s touring production of The Mariners of England at the Theatre Royal, a dramatic reconstruction, correct in every detail, of the Battle of Trafalgar on the deck of H.M.S. Victory, for which “the box plan will be on view at Miss Fitts’s florist shop, next to the theatre, to-day” (The West Australian, Monday, October 26, 1903, page 4). We can safely assume that Miss Fitts did not make the Theatre Royal’s box plan available to any and all inquirers as a selfless gesture of charity. Nor was the proximate location of her premises in any way accidental. There is of course the almost defining model, here, of the Covent Garden flower markets and their proximity since at least the eighteenth century to the Royal Opera House and many other West End theaters. Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912) rises from the bedrock afforded by the bottom end of the trade, and, of course, flower-sellers such as Eliza Doolittle were the brutalized foot-soldiers of a huge retail army at the head of which stood in command Edward Goodyear of The Royal Arcade, Albemarle Street—armed with his royal warrant as supplier of flowers to the Court. That army has been well covered through the second half of the twentieth century by social historians, but we still know almost nothing about the generals or their structure of command. And this partly explains why I have become so interested lately.

From the other direction, that of the stage door, we have amusing evidence of the deployment of upper-end floral tributes for hard-nosed publicity purposes. As before, that evidence needs to be weighed carefully because of a measure of thankfully unabashed mockery with which it was presented and packaged for the press. The following article circulated widely throughout Australia in 1909:

“Stagecraft Economy”

A lecturer, talking of economy, cited the case of a leading lady as told to him by her manager. The manager one Monday night entered a leading lady’s dressing-room with a huge bouquet in his hand. “The florist just sent this over, with the bill,” he murmured behind his hand. “I’ll have it—er—thrown on at the end of the trial scene, eh?” “No, don’t throw it on,” said the leading lady. “Let an usher hand it up. I want to use it all this week.” [Launceston Examiner (Tasmania), Wednesday, August 18, 1909, page 7; the Queenslander (Brisbane), Saturday, July 24, 1909, page 47; the North Western Advocate and the Emu Bay Times (Tasmania), Saturday, August 7, 1909, page 2, and the Capricornian (Rockhampton, Queensland), Saturday, August 21, 1909, page 8.]

Hilarious? No doubt, but let us consider a number of ugly implications. The cynicism with which manager and leading lady are here shown to collude is further exaggerated by the fact that she was playing role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and that the plan was vulgarly to exploit their bouquet at the end of Act IV, scene i, the famous trial scene—as unworthy a lapse of taste, because it anticipates by almost two whole acts the end of the play and therefore upstages the rest of the cast, as the great size and expensiveness of the bouquet, which, in turn, underlies her determination to keep and recycle it... for a whole week. So the leading lady is extravagant but mean, vain but shrewd, evidently talented and successful enough to play Portia but certainly not above craving more and better cheap publicity—while, at the same time, confident that lowly front-of-house staff will gladly follow her orders, and collaborate with the deception. She is also as greedy for extravagant blooms as she is evidently unappreciative of their beauty; how do we presume they will look at the end of that busy long week? Leaving all that aside, there are two other important flecks of detail. In filling their order for this mendacious bouquet, which will masquerade as the tribute paid by a member of the lady’s adoring public, the florists were evidently not content to supply their flowers on account, but delivered them with the bill—in other words a vague but pointed insinuation that the leading lady and her furtive management (speaking behind his hand) might not be entirely reliable customers, and therefore not in possession of unclouded respectability. If there were any doubt about that, consider the source of the story: the manager himself, ungallantly and disloyally revealing his leading lady in a most unflattering light. There is, finally, the further implication that the basis upon which the manager enjoyed unfettered access to her dressing-room was at best unsavory. None of this could have been lost on an Edwardian reader alert to social nuance, and it is further telling that the joke was especially uproarious to an Australian public that was well accustomed to various comparable sneers being directed squarely at them from the heart of the imperial capital—as indeed, incredibly, very occasionally they still are. And now I must take out the rubbish.

Further florists

As I have indicated previously, most information about the better florists operating profitably in Edwardian London and elsewhere is usually contained in trivializing shreds of humorous gossip in the press—little more than column filler, as in the following example, but with a surprising capacity to endure. As is indicated by the by-line, this article originated in the New York Herald, and made its first subsequent appearance in the Ann Arbor Argus on Tuesday, January 1, 1895 (page 4), a suitably chucklesome bon-bon for New Year’s Day observances in the frigid Midwest. Seven years later it was still doing the rounds in Australian newspapers, appearing word-for-condescending-word in that organ of Western District hauteur, for example, the Portland Guardian (Monday, June 30, 1902):

“Bouquets and Circumspection”

That any man can step into a florist’s and order a bouquet for any lady is no longer possible in New York. There is a florist, and a very exclusive one, who refuses all orders that do not seem just “conventional,” to be very polite about it. An elderly man unknown to the florist was refused a bouquet to be sent to a schoolgirl, and a young sport’s greenback was handed back to him when he ordered a box of flowers for a beautiful society leader whom he had admired in her Victoria—New York Herald.

First let us now begin to identify some patterns. The “fashionable florist” and the “West End Florist Girl,” as we have seen, both laid particular emphasis on the stratagems of “old men,” and certain vaguely questionable habits of the young, such the “coster chap” with the impertinently flamboyant buttonhole that so vexed the latter. These are beginning to look suspiciously like tropes. Second, there is the transatlantic dimension. Should we assume that society florists in Edwardian London provided the template for florists aspiring to exclusiveness in New York? Maybe, maybe not. Third, and most intriguingly, let us consider an ethical problem that lies at the core of the joke. Assuming in this case that the source of information can only have been the exclusive New York florist him- or herself—and incidentally that question of gender is an increasingly intriguing one—how hid the florist know that the Miss so-and-so for whom he tried to purchase the bouquet was an inviolable schoolgirl unless the creepy old man readily disclosed it in the first place? It seems unlikely that the florist had the time or resources with which to conduct discreet on-the-spot inquiries. And how did the florist know that the young sport’s acquaintanceship with the beautiful society leader was based solely on admiring her impertinently from afar, and in public, if he had not freely admitted as much? (A “victoria” was an open horsedrawn carriage.) This would suggest that both would-be customers regarded the florist as pretty accommodating, but that the florist’s claim to exclusiveness was at this date strongly wedded to the concept of strict propriety. I doubt if the loose morals on one side and the aspiration to respectability on the other were purely American qualities. No doubt the better London florists attempted to navigate similarly shark-infested waters.

The author of the ugly piece about “The West End Florist Girl,” meanwhile, (The London Journal, March 11, 1911, page 468) concluded by reluctantly making “his way out of the sweet-scented realm into the land of noise and bustle, motor smells and grimy smoke,” a valuable reminder of the ubiquity of the motor car, and its deleterious effect upon central London. Yet even this was an issue that the better florists were called upon to alleviate, if any of the following grounds for disapproval, expressed in 1909 by the Scotsman, actually existed:

“Well-Perfumed Motor Cars”

The ultra-fashionable, wasteful woman of “society” is most particular just now (says the ‘Scotsman’) about having a supply of flowers for her motor car. The idea is to leave a standing order with a florist to send a big bunch of roses, or violets, or even orchids, to the garage every morning, where the posies are placed in receptacles inside the car. There they are when the machine is brought around to the house, and the interior of the [Demi-] tonneau [a Cadillac motor car] is by that time nicely perfumed. Besides, the flowers make the car look very nice indeed. A fresh bunch may be placed in the car in the afternoon, and again in the evening, to perfume the car for madame’s progress to the theatre. [Launceston Examiner, Saturday, March 20, 1909, page 2, and Dubbo Liberal and Macquarie Advocate, Saturday, April 3, 1909, page 7.]

Obviously the point here is to mock wasteful Madame, but it would be hard to do so if there were not some plausible premise. And, now, I think, it is time to seek more scraps of information about the better London florists in the fruitful realm of the theater...

The florists

I may have over-emphasized the cumbersome character of the exotic “shower and châtelaine” floral bouquets that were hauled through Buckingham Palace by ladies being presented at Court during the reign of King Edward VII. In her regular column, “Fashion Notes,” for Bow Bells: A Magazine of General Literature and Art for Family Reading (Vol. 21, No. 268, February 17, 1893, page 177), the chatty but authoritative columnist known as “Iris” reported an exciting recent development:

The season is already anticipated, and we are contemplating the dress of the [afternoon] Drawing-rooms [at Buckingham Palace]; for these there will be a new and pretty arrangement of flowers, now such very important portions of Court costume. Hitherto it has been found by the inventor of the posy, shower, and châtelaine bouquets that the poke forward given by the handle somewhat marred the effect. A new and clever invention has therefore been patented under the title of the “Victoria Shower,” in which there is no apparent handle to a light, graceful, feathery mass of bloom and foliage. Not so great a mass either, since the new shower is smaller than the old one. The flowers are so settled that the hand is inserted right into the centre of the sprays, which fall over and round it. It is very light, the balance is quite equal, the flowers can be held quite close to the wearer’s figure, avoiding all appearance of bulkiness, and the shower can be laid down anywhere without injury to the flowers. These are (writes an expert) all estimable things in a floral appendage to court dress, and go very far to recommend the new invention, which is so simple in construction that it seems wonderful it should not have been thought of before.

It is difficult to judge whether Edwardian Court bouquets, which seem to have refreshed, indeed exaggerated, the late-Victorian twin concepts of bulk and poke, relied upon the ingenious undercarriage afforded by this Victoria Shower device, whatever it was. However, if these creations were marginally less cumbersome than they look, they were every bit as expensive. In a long article (part of an intriguing series) entitled “Flowers of the Market” in The Leisure Hour (March 1894), W. J. Gordon noted that the “London flower-bill apparently averages £1,000 a day, and all the area of the London parks twice over could not provide enough for the annual supply.” Interviewed by The London Journal four years later (Vol. 29, No. 756, June 11, 1898, page 526), “a fashionable florist” estimated that £5,000 was daily spent on cut flowers in London. The wholesale flower markets were, of course, in Cheapside and Covent Garden, but this was more than simply a point of distribution for local and imported blooms. Not unlike the ostrich feather industry, it was essentially a valuable international commodity exchange:

In Japan there are bulb farms on much the same lines as the Dutch ones [for tulips], but the crop is mostly lilies. The bulbs are shipped, packed in cases averaging a thousand each, and come to London by every P. & O. steamer. One firm alone—that of Protheroe & Morris, in Cheapside—sell 300 tons of Lilium auratum [Japanese mountain lilies] in a year, to say nothing of the less popular lilies like album [Martagon], rubrum [red Japanese], Krameri [bamboo], etc. At the moment of writing a sale is taking place in which 427 cases from Japan, containing over 40,000 bulbs of sixteen species of Lilium, in addition to 40,000 African tuberoses and other plants, are to be disposed of during the afternoon. Although these lily bulbs come to London, it does not follow that they stay here. At every sale, lots are bought for all parts of the country, and for Germany, France, Belgium, and America…Another foreign bulb running into hundreds of thousands is the tuberose. In one shipment alone, at one of these sales, 270,000 were sold. These came from New York; but South Africa sends to Cheapside 800,000 tuberoses a year. Another bulb that crosses the Atlantic eastwards is Lilium Harrisi, from the Bermudas, as many as 200,000 passing through the sale-room, shipped direct, in addition to what find their way here through the American ports. Orchids are somewhat of a luxury, but we can hardly leave Cheapside without mentioning the Friday sales, through which last year passed over 200,000 established orchids, to say nothing of the miscellaneous and, therefore, speculative. But all orchid-buying is more or less a speculation. A man bought an orchid here for nine shillings, thinking it was a well-known variety; it flowered and proved a rarity, and he brought it back to sell it again under the hammer for forty-five guineas. Others have bought orchids for a shilling, and doubted if they were worth it; some have paid at these sales £300 and more for a single plant, but this would hardly be a flower of the market. The ordinary orchids come in bundles, mostly from Brazil and Madagascar…

Perhaps the liveliest and most telling portion of Mr. Gordon’s account of the London wholesale flower trade is his description of an auction sale at Covent Garden. It is a fascinating exercise in historical reconstruction to imagine the agents, representatives, or junior staff of Carlton–White, Madame Josephine, or Messrs. Felton—perhaps even young Mr. Felton himself—navigating that raucous coal-face side of their business, and afterwards returning to crowded workrooms secreted far above or behind their hushed premises in North Audley Street or Hanover Square or the Royal Arcade, and converting such raw material into four dozen ladies’ shower and châtelaine bouquets at 20 guineas apiece, with a profit margin of more than 2,000%:

In Covent Garden an auction sale of foreign flowers is an uproarious affair, a deafening tumult of half a dozen crowds, punctuated with bangs of the hammer that make the old Floral Hall ring again. The “furniture” for each crowd consists of a rostrum in which sit the auctioneer and a couple of clerks, a platform in front where stand up two porters, and three sides of a square made up of portable staging three or four tiers high, crowded with noisy dealers and bystanders overlooking the equally noisy group in the middle. Basket after basket, box after box, is handed in from the back. One man near the platform cuts the string or wrenches up the lid; the porter to the left opens the package and hands up the delivery note over his shoulder to the clerk, who passes it to the auctioneer; and while the auctioneer glances at it, the other porter grasps a bundle of flowers rfom the package, gives them a shake, and holds them up as a sample. Now and then above the tumult you can hear snatches of what the auctioneer is saying: “Fresh from the shores of the blue Mediterranean—;” roar; “Ah! here is something fine—;” roar; “Beautiful—;” a sound as of a train in a tunnel; bang; bang; “All the same—;” roar; bang. Basket after basket, faster and faster, the bangs going four a minute, five a minute, ten a minute, the crowd yelling louder and louder, and waving their hands and frantically gesticulating. Go there at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday and see it; and wonder how a few hundred men in four or five furious groups can make such a hideous hullabaloo.

There is probably not much difference between the methods and manners of the wholesale flower trade versus the hush and polish of highest-end florists in New York and London today, but what is surely different is the degree to which Court florists of Edwardian London slaked an insatiable thirst for the rarest blooms such that their uppermost end was infinitely higher than ours.

The Evening Courts again

When at length, after the end of the Great War, evening Courts resumed at Buckingham Palace a number of reforms were wisely instituted through the Lord Chamberlain’s department, of which perhaps the most significant was the decision to make the enormous floral bouquets of earlier reigns optional. As reported in The Times on Friday, May 19, 1922 (“Bouquets for the Court: Flower Fashions of To-Day,” page 7):

The Court florists are keenly interested in the result of the “bouquets optional” decision which is written in pencil on the four sketches which are being shown at the Ceremonial Office. The florists have not been doing well for a long time owing to the high price of flowers and the general reluctance to spend money on the most forgivable and most perishable of all luxuries. And there is a fear that “bouquets optional” may result in a “fan” Court. However, the occasions in a woman’s life when she can carry a bouquet are so few that it is probable that the florists’ fears are groundless and that many women will avail themselves of the opportunity. The modern [post-War] bouquet, which is an adaptation of the Early Victorian bouquet, is far more lasting than the shower bouquet of past Courts, which flagged during the long wait before its owner made her bow to her Sovereign. Shower bouquets are still carried by the bride’s mother and the bridegroom’s mother at weddings, but brides generally carry sheaves and their maids Victorian bouquets. The latter are so tightly packed that even if one flower droops it is not noticeable among many, and the wire handle makes it easier to manipulate. The making of a Victorian bouquet is a work of art, for to secure the even circle of colour many of the flowers have to be picked to pieces and put together again. Among the little flowers suitable for these bouquets which will be in bloom at the time of the first Court are iris, mignonette, carnations, wallflowers, forget-me-nots, pansies, love-in-a-mist, stocks, moss roses, and white and mauve lilac. The little flowers are often the sweetest, and the perfume of a Victorian bouquet is a simpler thing, even with its many scents, than that of the exotic hothouse shower variety.

Fashion being so often a matter swinging pendulums, of sharp reaction from one decade to the next, there is much here that sheds light on the conventions of Edwardian Court protocol with which I have been so preoccupied lately, specifically that exotic hothouse shower bouquet which throughout the first decade of the twentieth century ladies were positively obliged to carry when being presented at Court. Towards the beginning of the reign of King Edward VII, according to an article by Mary Howarth in the Pall Mall Magazine, “the florists were fluttered by an announcement that arose in aristocratic circles that bouquets were no more to be allowed, because they took up too much room [my italics].” This proposed reform was evidently abandoned under strong pressure from the Court florists, who, if advertisements published on the front page of The Times are an accurate indication, outnumbered Court dressmakers and Court hairdressers (whose principal function was to install and secure tiaras, veils, and white ostrich-feather headdresses) by a factor of three. Such businesses came and went. In 1890, for example, the partnership of “Wellesley and Smith, formerly under the style of Madame Josephine, of Lower Grosvenor Place, S.W., Court florists” dissolved amid much acrimony—but in the Edwardian decade the main players, led by Edward Goodyear of The Royal Arcade, Albemarle Street, and Old Bond Street (who held a royal warrant), were: G. Adam and Company at 42 New Bond Street; John Barker and Company of Kensington High Street; Carlton–White at 53 New Bond Street; Messrs. Felton and Sons of Hanover Square; The London Flower Company (proprietor Howard Howes) at 22A North Audley Street; R. Silvester of 105 Gloucester Road, Queen’s Gate; G. Strudwick of 20 and 21 Bayswater Terrace, Kensington Gardens; Mr. Titt of Windsor, and L. O. Walter, 31 Bryanston Street.

These firms supplied ladies with often floor-length bouquets comprising sprays of pungent gardenias, roses (damask, tea, briar), clove-scented malmaison carnations, nodding white eucharis, Belgian camellias, Japanese lilies, calla lilies, prong-like mignonettes, orange-blossom, jasmine, African tuberoses, giant narcissi, clematis, mimosa, Roman hyacinths, Dutch tulips, Chinese fuchsias, and above all rare orchids—the longest possible sprays of the largest, spottiest, stripiest, frilliest, and most carnivorous-looking blooms. Arrangements of these could assume the dimensions, weight, and cumbersome clamminess of a mutant cabbage, from which also dangled a Portuguese man o’ war root system consisting of tendrils, vines, maidenhair fern, myrtle, ivy, wormwood, lady’s laces, and fragrant eucalyptus. Even as one entered one’s state coach, it was almost as if these were still trailing out the front door. Tied with a broad watered-silk ribbon, the raw materials for these crazy Edwardian floral effusions ultimately came from the twice-weekly wholesale auction sales in Covent Garden, and, once assembled by the Court florists, could easily cost more than twenty guineas, a third more than the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna of Russia paid in St. Petersburg for that fan. The journey to Buckingham Palace therefore involved carrying a bulky three-and-a-half to four yard train over one gloved arm; preventing it from getting crushed; holding the enormous bouquet in one hand, being careful not to squash the delicate fronds, and, in the other, a folded fan and a reticule or small purse and an entrée card, all the while balancing a diamond tiara and clutch of two or three bouncy ostrich feathers on your head. These were vulnerable to an unfortunate yank on the regulation white veil that descended from them. Once you reached the Palace, there ensued a crush in the vestibule. An army of ladies’ maids took wraps and cloaks in exchange for a numbered ticket (which had to be received and put away). You then proceeded up staircases and through packed corridors under hot new electric lights. Yet by convention ladies approaching the King and Queen were not permitted to open their fan, and nor could they let go of their train or their bouquet or their card:

Now the moment of all moments arrives: the presence of Royalty is entered. Each lady has her card in her hand (and each gentleman has his); she delivers it to the functionary nearest the barrier after it has been passed; and at the moment she is inside the [Ball-]room is conscious that her train is being gently taken from her arm, where she has up to that moment jealously and lovingly borne it, by one of the Gentlemen-at-arms, and cleverly spread by two of them upon the floor. As she glides onwards her card is passed from hand to hand until it is taken by the Lord Chamberlain himself. Lord Clarendon stands at the King’s left hand. Deliberately he reads the card, deliberately scans the donor of it over his spectacles, as if to satisfy himself that all is absolutely to his judgment, ripe and right for the important procedure of announcement, and then in a clear voice he speaks the name, or, should the case be that of a debutante, announces her chaperon’s first, adding that of the lady she is presenting. When her name is uttered the lady is face to face with her King; she curtseys very, very low to him. The King bows, bestowing upon her that most gracious smile which seems to convey to her a direct message of hospitable welcome. Then a few steps further she moves: she is face to face with her Queen. Again she curtseys very, very low. Her Majesty inclines her head and sweetly smiles. Onward she goes, her obeisances all made. At the portal on the other side, as if by magic, her train is returned to her arm and she passes out…

...by which Miss Howarth surely meant “leaves the room,” and not “loses consciousness”—although it is inconceivable that these rituals did not from time to time claim at least a few victims of fainting, or even heart attack. Meanwhile, bearing in mind all the encumbrances, how was one supposed to tackle the supper room afterwards, viz. “the most delicately delightful ‘little’ dishes, and superlatively charming cakes and creams...[which forms of refreshment were] taken standing”? How, indeed, did one contrive simply to keep one’s balance when either the floors were polished up to the smooth slipperiness of plate glass, or else the deep pile of silk carpets tugged powerfully at one’s various layers of hem?