sm is coming now?

HERBERT. Well, you may laugh, but the world has n't got used to good
clothes yet. The majority do not wear them with ease. People who only
put on their best on rare and stated occasions step into an artificial
feeling.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I wonder if that's the reason the Parson finds it so
difficult to get hold of his congregation.

HERBERT. I don't know how else to account for the formality and vapidity
of a set "party," where all the guests are clothed in a manner to
which they are unaccustomed, dressed into a condition of vivid
self-consciousness. The same people, who know each other perfectly
well, will enjoy themselves together without restraint in their ordinary
apparel. But nothing can be more artificial than the behavior of
people together who rarely "dress up." It seems impossible to make the
conversation as fine as the clothes, and so it dies in a kind of inane
helplessness. Especially is this true in the country, where people have
not obtained the mastery of their clothes that those who live in the
city have. It is really absurd, at this stage of our civilization, that
we should be so affected by such an insignificant accident as dress.
Perhaps Mandeville can tell us whether this clothes panic prevails in
the older societies.

THE PARSON. Don't. We've heard it; about its being one of the
Englishman's thirty-nine articles that he never shall sit down to dinner
without a dress-coat, and all that.

THE MISTRESS. I wish, for my part, that everybody who has time to eat
a dinner would dress for that, the principal event of the day, and do
respectful and leisurely justice to it.

THE YOUNG LADY. It has always seemed singular to me that men who work
so hard to build elegant houses, and have good dinners, should take so
little leisure to enjoy either.

MANDEVILLE. If the Parson will permit me, I should say that the chief
clothes question abroad just now is, how to get any; and it is the same
with the dinners.

II

It is quite unnecessary to say that the talk about clothes ran into the
question of dress-reform, and ran out, of course. You cannot converse on
anything nowadays that you do not run into some reform. The Parson says
that everybody is intent on reforming everything but himself. We are all
trying to associate ourselves to make everybody else behave as we do.
Said--

OUR NEXT DOOR. Dress reform! As if people couldn't change their clothes
without concert of action. Resolved