lady's
wardrobe was laid aside, and another substituted for it that answered to
the demanding spirit of the hat. In a little while this plain lady was
not plain any more, but most gorgeously dressed, and possessed with the
desire to be in the height of the fashion. It came to this, that she had
a tea-gown made out of a window-curtain with a flamboyant pattern.
Solomon in all his glory would have been ashamed of himself in her
presence.

But this was not all. Her disposition, her ideas, her whole life, was
changed. She did not any more think of going about doing good, but of
amusing herself. She read nothing but stories in paper covers. In place
of being sedate and sober-minded, she was frivolous to excess; she spent
most of her time with women who liked to "frivol." She kept Lent in the
most expensive way, so as to make the impression upon everybody that she
was better than the extremest kind of Lent. From liking the sedatest
company she passed to liking the gayest society and the most fashionable
method of getting rid of her time. Nothing whatever had happened to her,
and she is now an ornament to society.

This story is not an invention; it is a leaf out of life. If this lady
that autumn day had bought a plain bonnet she would have continued on in
her humble, sensible way of living. Clearly it was the hat that made the
woman, and not the woman the hat. She had no preconception of it; it
simply happened to her, like any accident--as if she had fallen and
sprained her ankle. Some people may say that she had in her a concealed
propensity for frivolity; but the hat cannot escape the moral
responsibility of calling it out if it really existed. The power of
things to change and create character is well attested. Men live up to or
live down to their clothes, which have a great moral influence on manner,
and even on conduct. There was a man run down almost to vagabondage,
owing to his increasingly shabby clothing, and he was only saved from
becoming a moral and physical wreck by a remnant of good-breeding in him
that kept his worn boots well polished. In time his boots brought up the
rest of his apparel and set him on his feet again. Then there is the
well-known example of the honest clerk on a small salary who was ruined
by the gift of a repeating watch--an expensive timepiece that required at
least ten thousand a year to sustain it: he is now in Canada.

Sometimes the influence of Things is good and sometimes it is bad. W