is that it is practically impossible for you to say what it is
that the women wear around a dinner-table. Women dress for breakfast
and undress for dinner. As for the sight offered to our gaze from the
boxes at the opera, we might as well be in a Turkish bath. And the most
amusing and edifying part of it is that this fashion is more
flourishing in puritanical England than in any country I know, and that
most of those beautiful daughters of Albion whom you see so much of are
the very same ones who are presidents, vice-presidents and secretaries
of the societies for the suppression of the nude in the public parks,
the museums and art-galleries and other British institutions for the
suggestion of indecency.

Who says that the world is sad?

'Society ought to be exposed,' I once remarked to a beautiful member of
the English aristocracy, 'for giving that bad example.' 'You are quite
right,' she said; 'but that will do no good, because I believe that
there is nothing that English society enjoys more than being exposed.'
'Evidently!' I thought, as I looked at the glorious shoulders exposed
to my gaze.

I was quite right when I once exclaimed: 'Provided an English woman
does not show her feet, she is safe and feels comfortable.'

In the way of dressing, of all the women of Europe and America, the
Germans are the worst, the French the best, and the Americans the
smartest. The German women are covered, the English clothed, the
Americans arrayed, and the French dressed. I am not now speaking of
high life--these people are the same all the world over; and whenever a
writer publishes a criticism on the life and manners of any nation he
ought to place the following epigraph at the top of every page he
writes, so that the reader may not lose sight of it: 'All civilized
nations in the world are alike in one respect: they are composed of two
kinds of people--those that are ladies and gentlemen, and those that
are not.' Then there could be no misunderstanding about what he writes.

I think it is acknowledged that the French women are the best dressed
women in the world, and that French dressmakers are the authority on
what should be worn and how it should be worn. Next I should say
decidedly the American woman. In the United States the latest French
fashions are worn in all their freshness and glory, but too often with
exaggeration. And, when the French fashions are already outrageous in
their extravagance of style and size, then th