ation platforms. See them parading the streets in
their unemployed hours; they are the companions of every soldier; they
crowd the cinemas, music-halls, and theaters. Who has altered the
fashions about every three months? and this has been going on in war
time. Why, the munition workers and the forty-shilling-a-week girls. No
longer was finery always bought out of men's earnings, but out of their
own; put on to give some man a treat or to fire the envy of other girls.
The factory girl has taken to silk stockings and fine lingerie and the
lady to Balbriggan and calico.

The vast change that has come into the daily lives of women, possibly,
in no direction is more startling than it has been in this matter of
dress. Many shops which are near the factories where munition girls have
been employed have organized war-clubs, in which, on payment of a small
weekly sum, the girls could buy articles of attire far in advance even
of their high wages. Shops festooned with furs of every description,
where coats costing ten, twenty, and even thirty and more guineas, were
frequently bought; shops whose windows were a clutter of tissue-like
crepe-de-chine underclothes and blouses; boot-clubs and jewelry-clubs,
these last, garish establishments, secure in the glamour of
irresistible imitations--all have urged to extravagance and a madness
for ornament.

The West-end tradesmen and the shareholders of the big drapery shops
have been chuckling and rubbing their hands. Dividends have sprung up to
a figure they have never before reached. Never before has so much money
been wasted on adornment.

Our young women have little thought beyond the present use of what they
buy. But I believe that much of this extravagance--the delight in
self-gratification which finds other expression in jazzing, in
sweet-eating, in card playing, smoking and similar pleasures--is not so
much the outcome of the thoughtlessness of youth as a way of escape from
Self, a misdirected effort toward safety, unconscious no doubt, but
terribly real.

Notice these girls. You will see them best in a walk down Oxford street
or in Leicester Square, where, snared by each displayed window, they
hover and cluster like wasps drawn to a trap of sweet food. All the
biggest shops in London are devoted to women's clothes. Do you realize
that? And it is not only that they are the biggest, but there are more
of them than any other half a dozen trades put together--the only
exception be