that distinguishes man from the beasts. The peacock is no proof to the contrary; for if, as scientists suggest to us, all radiant plumage has been developed as a means of attraction, at least the ideal of adornment has been, in the case of the birds, consistently æsthetic. The feathery fashions have always been intrinsically good. Whereas (to be flippant) the attraction exercised by the latest mode would seem usually to point to some principle of unnatural selection. The bird of Paradise, who is probably irresistible in his native forest, can be positively repellent on a hat. Yes; the sense of mode is curiously different from the sense of beauty. Let us, however, be serious.

Preachers of all time-and satirists, who are lay-preachers have declaimed against female extravagance in dress. It must be confessed that the sex of the more peaceful pursuits has been the more exuberantly adorned. The male costume worn, say, at the court of Henri III, was every bit as bad as anything that contemporary ladies could have boasted; but even in the time of Henri III, a man had to hold himself ready for the saddle and the tented field. Some part of his life was bound to be spent in garments as rational as he could conceive them. It was the female sex that could expand, unchecked and unpruned, into such wild tendrils, such orchid-like incontinent bloom, of "changeable apparel."

From the earliest times, it is the woman who has been designated as the sinner in this respect. On this point, the Old and New Testaments are, for once, agreed; Isaiah and St. Paul are at one. "The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets . . . and the earrings . . the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping-pins . . . the fine linen, and the hoods and the veils," the one accuses; "broidered hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array," complains the other. Ezekiel thunders against "the women that sew pillows to the armholes" (the gigot sleeve in the reign of Zedekiah!) "and make kerchiefs for the head of persons of every stature, to hunt souls." And the tradition has remained. It is perhaps the only subject on which St. Ignatius Loyola and John Knox would have been thoroughly sympathetic. One is certainly at liberty to infer from the chorus that it is easier for a camel to pass through the needle's eye than for anything really chic to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

All these gentlemen, to be sure, seem to have objected to the fact and purpose of feminine adornment, rather than to rapid changes in the methods adopted. But I cannot believe that St. Paul, who scored the Attic curiosity born of the Attic ennui, would not have preached even more violently, had he foreseen the need, against fashion than against beauty. And is it not fashion rather than beauty that

is subtly discriminated against by all religious orders? The nun, like the Quakeress, must adopt a single color and a single mode; though nun and Quakeress, both, often find their chosen garb the most becoming they could possibly wear. No dress could be more beautiful than that which I remember from my childhood's convent. It fell in rich and simple folds of violet-violet being neither purple nor crimson, but something indefinably magnificent midway between enhanced by white linen guimpe and cream-colored veiling. It gave the daughter of a French duke, I remember, the aspect of a queen regnant. Yet it represented poverty, chastity, and obedience. No one is especially concerned with the nun's being unbecomingly clad. A subtler mortification is supposed to lie in her engaging to dress in exactly the same way all her life. The mortification is of course heightened by the fact that she shares her style of dress with the rest of the community, regardless of type. But in any case the first thing that the postulant renounces is fashionable clothing. They leave her curls to be cut off later.

It is not, however, with the moral aspect of fashion that I am concerned. The moral question, indeed, has ceased to be very poignant; even our Calvinist great-grandmothers permitted a shy predominance of trimming on the "congregation side" of their bonnets. The

moral aspect of fashion disguises itself nowadays as an economic consideration. With economic considerations, again, I have no special concern. They are writ large over half the printed pages of our time. Some statistician every month proves to us something appalling: either that,

since our women must walk gay, and money buys their gear,

materials are adulterated, or sewing-women are starved, or shop-girls seek the primrose path, or husbands die of the strain in their early forties. To much the same music, the New York Customs officials stage, each day, an elaborate melodrama on the steamship piers. We know that, from "Nearseal" to "Nearsilk," the poor will sacrifice comfort to cut, and that a really "good" milliner makes a profit of a hundred per cent on each hat. These things are all true; and Heaven forbid that one should shirk the economic question! But I very much doubt if either moralist or statistician will turn the trick. Yet they have only, it would seem, to enlist a few other facts as good as their own, to be quite sure of success.

For not even the cynic will pretend that the real object of fashions is to disfigure. It is quite without intention that M. Worth and Mme. Paquin and all their prototypes, congeners, and successors, have become the foes

of beauty. They have simply never stopped to consider that the very notion of the changing mode is the negation of all æsthetic law. The most damning thing about fashions is that they make inevitably, nine years out of ten, for the greatest ugliness of the greatest number. And this is the real Achilles tendon of la mode. Can anything be more absurd than to impose a single style on the fat and the thin, on the minimum wage and the maximum income?

I admit that no fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is undoubtedly the thin millionairess. But the fat woman and the lean purse must make the best of each style in turn, as it comes along. And if one has ever seen a fat woman in (for example) a hobble skirt-even in an academic edition of a hobble skirt-one knows that this is not a light thing to say. As for the lean purse, it is not only in alarmist articles that the workinggirl goes without half her luncheons to buy a rhinestone sunburst. One has known the cases. Nor is the coercion purely psychological. The cheapest Eighth Avenue suit, which, readymade, costs something-and-ninety-eight cents, is sure to be a hasty and sleazy imitation (at many removes, and losing something with each) of a Fifth Avenue model. It is one of the few true paradoxes that people who must dress cheaply must dress "in style." And that