om for a
half a dozen dresses and their accessories.

=WHEN THE INCOME IS LIMITED=

No one can dress well on nothing a year; that must be granted at the
outset. But a woman who has talent, taste, and ingenuity can be suitably
and charmingly dressed on little a year, especially at present.

First of all, to mind wearing a dress many times because it indicates a
small bank account, is to exhibit a false notion of the values in life.
Any one who thinks well or ill of her, in accordance with her income, can
not be too quickly got rid of! But worthwhile people _are_ influenced in
her disfavor when she has clothes in number and quality out of proportion
to her known financial situation.

It is tiresome everlastingly to wear black, but nothing is so serviceable,
nothing so unrecognizable, nothing looks so well on every occasion. A very
striking dress can not be worn many times without making others as well as
its owner feel bored at the sight of it. "Here comes the Zebra" or "the
Cockatoo!" is inevitable if a dress of stripes or flamboyant color is worn
often. She who must wear one dress through a season and have it perhaps
made over the next, would better choose black or cream color. Or perhaps a
certain color suits her, and this fact makes it possible for her
habitually to wear it without impressing others with her lack of clothes.
But whether her background be black or cerise it should invariably blend
with her whole wardrobe, so that all accessories can be made to do double
or quadruple service.

Supposing you are a young woman with more beauty than wealth! Let us also
suppose you have three evening dresses, a blue, a pink and a green. At the
moment you can wear flesh-colored slippers and stockings with everything,
which rather weakens the argument--however, a blue fan does not look well
with a pink or a green dress, nor do the other combinations. Supposing,
however, you had instead a cream-colored dress, a flesh-colored, and an
orchid one. Flesh-colored slippers look much better with cream and orchid
than with either green or blue, at any rate! A watermelon pink fan is
lovely in night-light with all three; so is a cream one. Or perhaps by
changing both fan and slippers, a different effect is produced, since the
colors of your clothes are background colors.

But nothing really can compare with the utility and smartness of black.
Take a black tulle dress, made in the simplest possible way; worn plain,
it is a simple