ho is going to marry require a
complete outfit of that sort? It seems to suggest--well, pre-nuptial
rags at least, George. Then the costume. Why should a sane healthy
woman be covered up in white gauze like the confectionery in a shop
window when the flies are about? And why----?"

He was going on in quite an aggressive tone. "There isn't a _why_," I
said, "for any of it." This sort of talk always irritates a married
man because it revives his own troubles. "It's just the rule. Surely,
if a wife is worth having she is worth being ridiculous for? You ought
to be jolly glad you don't have to wear a fool's cap and paint your
nose red. 'More precious than rubies'----"

"Don't," he said.

"It must be these tradesmen," he began bitterly after an interval.
"Some one must be responsible, and it's just their way. Do you know,
George, I sometimes fancy that they have hypnotised womankind into the
belief that all these uncomfortable things are absolutely necessary to
a valid marriage--just as they have persuaded the landlady class that
no house is complete without a big mirror over the fireplace and a
bulgy sideboard. There is a very strong flavour of mesmeric suggestion
about a woman's attitude towards these matters, considered in the light
of her customary common sense. Do you know, George, I really believe
there is a secret society of tradesmen, a kind of priesthood, who get
hold of our womenkind and muddle them up with all these fancies. It's
a sort of white magic. Have you ever been in a draper's shop, George?"

"Never," I said: "I always wait outside--among the dogs."

"Have you ever read a ladies' newspaper?"

"I didn't know," said I, "that there was any part to read. It's all
advertisements; all the articles are advertisements, all the
paragraphs, the stories, the answers to correspondents--everything."

"That's exactly what makes me think the tradesmen have hypnotised the
sex. It may be they do it in those drapers' dens. A man spots that
kind of thing at once and drops the paper. Women go on year after
year, simply worshipping a paper hoarding of that kind, and doing
patiently everything they are told to do therein. Anyhow, it is only
in this way that I can account for all these expensive miseries of
matrimony. I can't understand a woman in full possession of her
faculties deliberately exasperating the man she has to live with--I
suppose all men submit to it under protest--for these stale and