to be composed in equal parts
of mind and leather, the elements of body and soul being left out so far
as is consistent with existence in human form. But such women are also
to be found in England, although perhaps in fewer numbers than here.

As to dress, that, as a man, I must regard as a purely adventitious and
an essentially unimportant matter. If a woman be beautiful, or charming
without actual beauty, a man cares very little in what she is dressed,
so long as she seems at ease in her clothes, and their color is becoming
to her and harmonious. There is no greater mistake than the assumption
that being dressed in good taste is indicative of good breeding, of
education, or of social advantage of any kind. Nor is it even a sign of
good taste in any other particular. You shall see a woman who has come
out of the slums, and whose life is worthy of her origin and her
breeding, although it may have become gilded and garish, and she shall
dress herself daily, morning, noon, and night, with such an exquisite
sense of fitness in all things, with such an instinctive appreciation of
harmony of outline and color, that your eye will be soothed with the
sight of her apparel; and she shall nevertheless be vulgar in mind and
manners, sordid in soul, in her life equally gross and frivolous. And
the converse is no less true. Women most happy in the circumstances of
their birth and breeding, intelligent, cultivated, charming, of whose
sympathy in regard to anything good or beautiful you may be sure, will
dress themselves in such an incongruous, heterogeneous fashion that the
beauty which they often possess triumphs with difficulty over their
effort to adorn it.

I feel, therefore, that I am saying very little against Englishwomen
when I say that in general they are the worst dressed human creatures
that I ever saw, except perhaps the female half of a certain class of
Germans. The reputation that they have in this respect among
Frenchwomen and "Americans" is richly deserved. Good taste is simply
absent. The notion of fitness, congruity, and "concatenation
accordingly" does not exist. In form the Englishwoman's dress is dowdy,
in color frightful. If not color-blind, she seems generally to be blind
to the effect of color, either singly or in combination. At the
Birmingham festival I saw a lady in a rich red-purple (plum color)
silk--high around the neck of course, as it was morning--and over this
swept a necklace of enormous coral bead