em could have cost
less than seventy or eighty dollars, and some of them must have been
even more expensive, and yet I don't doubt that this fall she will
feel that she must have just as many more. She runs through and wears
out these expensive things, with all their velvet and thread lace,
just as I wear my commonest ones; and at the end of the season they
are really gone,--spotted, stained, frayed, the lace all pulled to
pieces,--nothing left to save or make over. I feel as if Jenny and I
were patterns of economy when I see such things. I really don't know
what economy is. What is it?"

"There is the same difficulty in my housekeeping," said my wife. "I
think I am an economist. I mean to be one. All our expenses are on a
modest scale, and yet I can see much that really is not strictly
necessary; but if I compare myself with some of my neighbors, I feel
as if I were hardly respectable. There is no subject on which all the
world are censuring one another so much as this. Hardly any one but
thinks her neighbors extravagant in some one or more particulars, and
takes for granted that she herself is an economist."

"I'll venture to say," said I, "that there isn't a woman of my
acquaintance that does not think she is an economist."

"Papa is turned against us women, like all the rest of them," said
Jenny. "I wonder if it isn't just so with the men?"

"Yes," said Marianne, "it's the fashion to talk as if all the
extravagance of the country was perpetrated by women. For my part, I
think young men are just as extravagant. Look at the sums they spend
for cigars and meerschaums,--an expense which hasn't even the pretense
of usefulness in any way; it's a purely selfish, nonsensical
indulgence. When a girl spends money in making herself look pretty,
she contributes something to the agreeableness of society; but a man's
cigars and pipes are neither ornamental nor useful."

"Then look at their dress," said Jenny: "they are to the full as fussy
and particular about it as girls; they have as many fine, invisible
points of fashion, and their fashions change quite as often; and they
have just as many knick-knacks, with their studs and their sleeve
buttons and waistcoat buttons, their scarfs and scarf pins, their
watch chains and seals and seal rings, and nobody knows what. Then
they often waste and throw away more than women, because they are not
good judges of material, nor saving in what they buy, and have no
knowledge of how thi