truth. But they
have a way of persuading themselves that what they are about to say is
the truth. Women must believe in themselves before they can hope to
make other people believe in them; therefore they have themselves to
persuade first of all. Now, when men are going to utter an untruth
they never care whether they believe it or not, as long as they can
make other people believe it. And the so-called brutal honesty of man
is only brutal want of tact. That poor, patient, misused word,
"honesty"! How sick it must get of its abuse!

Yes, girls really believe, I suppose, that they dress for other girls.
But they do not. They dress for men. And only experience will teach
them the highest wisdom in the matter. But that they cannot acquire
until they believe that only another woman will know just how well
they are dressed, and, above all, whether Doucet turned them out, or a
dress-maker in the house at two dollars a day.

Men only take in the effect. Women know how the effect is produced. Of
course, now I am speaking of the general run of men and women: neither
the man who clerked at Cash & Silk's nor the one who pays his wife's
bills in Paris, but the man in his native state of charming ignorance
of materials; the man who always suggests a "gusset" as a remedy for
too scant a gown, who calls insertion "tatting," and who, in setting
out for the opera, will tell his wife to put on her "bonnet and
shawl," although she may have on point-lace and diamonds. In his more
modern aspect he tells you that a girl at the Junior Promenade had on
a blue dress with feathers around her neck--which you must translate
into meaning anything from blue satin to organdie, and that between
dances she wore a feather boa.

It is the effect only that men take in; and when a man goes into
ecstasies over a gown of pale green on a hot day just because you look
so cool and fresh in it, when you know that you paid but forty cents a
yard for it, and only nods when you show him your velvet and ermine
wrap, which cost you two hundred dollars, I would just like to ask you
if it pays to dress for him. Women know this from a sorrowful
experience. Girls have to learn it for themselves. A ball-dress of
white tarlatan, made up over white paper cambric, with a white sash,
will satisfy a man quite as well as a Paris muslin trimmed with a
hundred dollars' worth of Valenciennes lace and made up over silk.
Most of them would never know the difference.

I do not k