l man in the other arts, is never worth the
spirit and conception wrought out through a bit of stuff in her skillful
hands.

"Well, I wish that this art were more honored than it is. As education
should consist in thinking with one's mind, feeling with one's heart,
expressing the little personalities of the inmost, invisible _I_,--which
on the contrary are repressed, leveled down by conformity,--I would that
the young girl in her novitiate of womanhood, the future mother, might
early become the little exponent of this art of the toilet, her own
dressmaker in short--she who one day shall make the dresses of her
children. But with the taste and the gift to improvise, to express
herself in that masterpiece of feminine personality and skill--_a gown_,
without which a woman is no more than a bundle of rags."

The dress you have made for yourself is almost always the most becoming,
and, however that may be, it is the one that pleases you most. Women of
leisure too often forget this; working women, also, in city and country
alike. Since these last are costumed by dressmakers and milliners, in
very doubtful imitation of the modish world, grace has almost
disappeared from their dress. And has anything more surely the gift to
please than the fresh apparition of a young working girl or a daughter
of the fields, wearing the costume of her country, and beautiful from
her simplicity alone?

These same reflections might be applied to the fashion of decorating and
arranging our houses. If there are toilettes which reveal an entire
conception of life, hats that are poems, knots of ribbon that are
veritable works of art, so there are interiors which after their manner
speak to the mind. Why, under pretext of decorating our homes, do we
destroy that personal character which always has such value? Why have
our sleeping-rooms conform to those of hotels, our reception-rooms to
waiting-rooms, by making predominant a uniform type of official beauty?

What a pity to go through the houses of a city, the cities of a country,
the countries of a vast continent, and encounter everywhere certain
forms, identical, inevitable, exasperating by their repetition! How
esthetics would gain by more simplicity! Instead of this luxury in job
lots, all these decorations, pretentious but vapid from iteration, we
should have an infinite variety; happy improvisations would strike our
eyes, the unexpected in a thousand forms would rejoice our hearts, and
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