steful dress, but only in devoting to it too much money or too much time.
It is a blessed doctrine. The utmost extremes of dress, the love of colors,
of fabrics, of jewels, of "featherses," are, after all, but an effort after
the beautiful. The reason why the beautiful is not always the result is
because so many women are ignorant or merely imitative. They have no sense
of fitness: the short wear what belongs to the tall, and brunettes
sacrifice their natural beauty to look like blondes. Or they have no
adaptation; and even an emancipated woman may show a disregard for
appropriateness, as where a fine lady sweeps the streets, or a fair orator
the platform, with a silken or velvet train which accords only with a
carpet as luxurious as itself. What is inappropriate is never beautiful.
What is merely in the fashion is never beautiful. But who does not know
some woman whose taste and training are so perfect that fashion becomes to
her a means of grace instead of a despot, and the worst excrescence that
can be prescribed--a _chignon_, a hoop, a panier--is softened into
something so becoming that even the Parisian bondage seems but a chain of
roses?

In such hands, even "featherses" become a fine art, not a matter of vanity.
Are women so much more vain than men? No doubt they talk more about their
dress, for there is much more to talk about; yet did you never hear the men
of fashion discuss boots and hats and the liveries of grooms? A good friend
of mine, a shoemaker, who supplies very high heels for a great many pretty
feet on Fifth Avenue in New York, declares that women are not so vain in
that direction as men. "A man who thinks he has a handsome foot," quoth our
fashionable Crispin, "is apt to give us more trouble than any lady among
our customers. I have noticed this for twenty years." The testimony is
consoling--to women.

And this naturally suggests the question, What is to be the future of
masculine costume? Is the present formlessness and gracelessness and
monotony of hue to last forever, as suited to the rough needs of a workaday
world? It is to be remembered that the difference in this respect between
the dress of the sexes is a very recent thing. Till within a century or so,
men dressed as picturesquely as women, and paid as minute attention to
their costume. Even the fashions in armor varied as extensively as the
fashions in gowns. One of Henry III.'s courtiers, Sir J. Arundel, had
fifty-two complete suits of clo