it's a law of
Nature; and you remember all that long chapter in the Bible that we had
read in church last Sunday, about the curls and veils and tinkling
ornaments and crimping-pins, and all that. Women always have been too
much given to dress, and they always will be."

"The thing is," said Marianne, "how can any woman, I, for example, know
what is too much or too little? In mamma's day, it seems, a girl could
keep her place in society, by hard economy, and spend only fifty dollars
a year on her dress. Mamma found a hundred dollars ample. I have more
than that, and find myself quite straitened to keep myself looking well.
I don't want to live for dress, to give all my time and thoughts to it;
I don't wish to be extravagant; and yet I wish to be lady-like; it
annoys and makes me unhappy not to be fresh and neat and nice;
shabbiness and seediness are my aversion. I don't see where the fault
is. Can one individual resist the whole current of society? It certainly
is not strictly necessary for us girls to have half the things we do. We
might, I suppose, live without many of them, and, as mamma says, look
just as well, because girls did before these things were invented. Now,
I confess, I flatter myself, generally, that I am a pattern of good
management and economy, because I get so much less than other girls I go
with. I wish you could see Miss Thorne's fall dresses that she showed me
last year when she was visiting here. She had six gowns, and no one of
them could have cost less than seventy or eighty dollars, and some of
them must have been even more expensive; and yet I don't doubt that this
fall she will feel that she must have just as many more. She runs
through and wears out these expensive things, with all their velvet and
thread lace, just as I wear my commonest ones; and at the end of the
season they are really gone,--spotted, stained, frayed, the lace all
pulled to pieces,--nothing left to save or make over. I feel as if
Jennie and I were patterns of economy, when I see such things. I really
don't know what economy is. What is it?"

"There is the same difficulty in my housekeeping," said my wife. "I
think I am an economist. I mean to be one. All our expenses are on a
modest scale, and yet I can see much that really is not strictly
necessary; but if I compare myself with some of my neighbors, I feel as
if I were hardly respectable. There is no subject on which all the world
are censuring one another so much as thi