“JUST PLAIN BROWN”

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 186, 27 October 1927, Page 5

“JUST PLAIN BROWN”

I did not want to leave Rome without buying one of the famous silk woven scarves. On the last day of my visit, therefore, I went to a well-known shop, right in the very heart of Rome, to look for one. Many there were, all equally beautiful, with their deep fringes of scarlet, orange, gold and black. I had almost decided on a crimson shawl, with a pale blue border, but the price asked was prohibitive, and I sadly put it aside. Then another took my fancy—a dark green one with an exotic touch of yellow and blue—but again I had to admit that I could not afford it. Not that they were really expensive, considering the magnificence of the fabric and the amount of work that must have gone into them. . . . The woman at the counter was watching me shrewdly. She eagerly suggested my taking the green shawl, declaring it was the only one she had in that colour. When I explained why I could not buy it, she clapped’ her hands joyously. “Ah, signorina! I have something that will please you, and so cheap.” She scurried away to a dark corner and presently reappeared with the big brown shawl in her arms. She flung it on the counter and named the price. It was exactly half that asked for the others. I shook my head. “I know this is cheap enough, but it is merely—brown.” She smiled and moved nearer to the window, signing me to follow her. It was the hour of sunset and the piazza stood bathed in the fiercest crimson. The shopwoman threw the despised brown shawl on the window, folded it this way and that—folded it deftly, knowingly—and the sunset rays caught the brown silk and touched it to something almost incredibly beautiful. And yet it was plain, rather drab brown! “Do you see, Signorina,” she murmured. “Yes, just plain brown it is, but —do you know —what is brown?” “Just brown,” I ventured lamely. She laughed. “Yes, just brown. You take the crimson of the sun at evening, and add to it the golden morning gleam, and then mix it all with the blue —such as we have in our sea—and you will get the brown Plain and drab! But there is loveliness hidden in it, if you only knew. It is the way you look at things.” So I bought the brown shawl, and whenever I fancy it is plain and drab I remember the words of the old shopwoman. They take away the drabness of life as well as the drabness of the shawl! I.S.