and, are
employed fifteen hundred dressmakers, and where there is a special
workroom for the creation of models.

As all these people must find something to do, they create, unless they
merely steal from the dead; but one thing they always do, and that is
destroy yesterday. Out of their activities comes a continual stream of
new colors and new combinations of colors, of high heels and low heels,
gilt heels and jeweled heels; they give us the spat that is to keep out
the wet and then the spat that does not keep out the eye. Before me lies
a picture of a spat made of lace; another of a skirt slit so high as to
reveal a jeweled garter. That is creation, and I suppose I shall be told
that that is art. It is art sometimes, and very beautiful, but beauty
does not make it live; in fact beauty causes the creation to die more
swiftly, because the more appealing it is, the more it is worn: as soon
as it is worn by the many, the furious craving for distinction sweeps
down upon it and slays it. There are several mad women in the St. Anne
asylum in Paris whose peculiar disease is that they cannot retain the
same idea for more than a few seconds; they ring the changes on a few
hundreds of ideas. Properly governed, their inspirations might be
valuable in Grafton Street.

I do not think the end is near; indeed, fashions will be more extreme
to-morrow than they are to-day. The continual growth of wealth, and the
difficulty of spending it when it clots in a few hands, will make for a
greater desire to spend more, more quickly, more continually, and in
wilder and wilder forms. The women are to-day having individual orgies;
to-morrow will come the saturnalia.

3

There is a clear difference between the cost of women's clothes and of
men's. It is absolutely impossible to dress a woman of the comfortable
classes for the same amount per annum that will serve her husband well.
I must quote a few figures taken from Boston, New York, and London.

_Boston._--Persons considered: those having $4500 to $7500 a year.

Average price of a suit (coat and skirt), $40 ready to wear; made
by a dressmaker of slight pretensions, $125 to $225.

Afternoon dresses, ready to wear, $125 to $225.

Evening dresses, absolute minimum, $50; fashionable frocks, $200 to
$350.

On an income of $7500 a woman's hat will cost $25; variation, $20
to $45; hats easily attain $125.

Veils attain $5. Opera cloaks in stor