said Marianne.
"Don't you think the customs of society make a difference? Do you think,
as things are, we could go back and dress for the sum you did?"

"You cannot," said my wife, "without a greater sacrifice of feeling than
I wish to impose on you. Still, though I don't see how to help it, I
cannot but think that the requirements of fashion are becoming
needlessly extravagant, particularly in regard to the dress of women. It
seems to me, it is making the support of families so burdensome that
young men are discouraged from marriage. A young man, in a moderately
good business, might cheerfully undertake the world with a wife who
could make herself pretty and attractive for seventy-five dollars a
year, when he might sigh in vain for one who positively could not get
through, and be decent, on four hundred. Women, too, are getting to be
so attached to the trappings and accessories of life, that they cannot
think of marriage without an amount of fortune which few young men
possess."

"You are talking in very low numbers about the dress of women," said
Miss Featherstone. "I do assure you that it is the easiest thing in the
world for a girl to make away with a thousand dollars a year, and not
have so much to show for it either as Marianne and Jennie."

"To be sure," said I. "Only establish certain formulas of expectation,
and it is the easiest thing in the world. For instance, in your mother's
day girls talked of a pair of gloves,--now they talk of a pack; then it
was a bonnet summer and winter,--now it is a bonnet spring, summer,
autumn, and winter, and hats like monthly roses,--a new blossom every
few weeks."

"And then," said my wife, "every device of the toilet is immediately
taken up and varied and improved on, so as to impose an almost monthly
necessity for novelty. The jackets of May are outshone by the jackets of
June; the buttons of June are antiquated in July; the trimmings of July
are _passees_ by September; side-combs, back-combs, puffs, rats, and all
sorts of such matters, are in a distracted race of improvement; every
article of feminine toilet is on the move towards perfection. It seems
to me that an infinity of money must be spent in these trifles, by
those who make the least pretension to keep in the fashion."

"Well, papa," said Jennie, "after all, it's just the way things always
have been since the world began. You know the Bible says, 'Can a maid
forget her ornaments?' It's clear she can't. You see,