The Girl Who Turned Old-Fashioned to Attract the Boys

Six figures occupy a drawing room in Gibson's characteristic pen-and-ink cross-hatching: a young woman in a dropped-waist dark dress stands at center, hands clasped, while a tall, balding older man in formal evening coat bends toward her attentively—almost gallantly. A portly, lounging man to her left holds a glass; a stout seated figure in striped trousers occupies the sofa behind her. Two older men confer at a table to the right. The joke turns on the woman's conspicuously old-fashioned costume in a room of conventional Edwardian gentlemen who appear charmed precisely because she is different. Gibson's comic argument is quietly feminist in its irony: social performance and studied artifice—not natural charm—capture male attention. The men, uniformly middle-aged and undistinguished, serve as the punchline.