sort of
thing he will be turned into a lady's maid. The idea of a hook-and-eye
fills him with horror. His eyesight is not as good as it used to be,
and he dreads the notion that if I come out in one of these
new-fangled waists that hook up at the back he will be compelled to
put in an hour or two fastening it up for me every time I put it on,
and I don't blame him. It seems to me that if there is anything in
this world that is unbefitting the glorious manhood of a true
masculine being it is to have to sit down in a chair for an hour
before dinner looking for a half million hooks and eyes, or
cloth-covered buttons and loops, on the back of his wife's gown, and
trying to fasten them up properly without the use of language unsuited
to a lady's ears. When you think that the hand of man was made to
wield the sceptre of imperial power over this magnificent world, it
becomes a gross impropriety to divert it from the path of destiny into
so futile an effort as hooking up a mere bit of fuss, feathers and
fallals. You might just as well hitch up a pair of thoroughbred
elephants to a milk wagon. It will do, as Adam says, for the
Mollycoddle and the meticulous weakling, but never for a real man
worthy of the name. But after all that is no reason why woman should
be shorn of one of her chief glories, and I totally disagree with him
in his condemnation of all clothes just because some of them are
conceived in foolishness. Dresses can be made to button up at the
side, or in front, and when I think of some of the new fall styles
that are coming in I find myself regretting that I am over five
hundred years old, and cannot with strict propriety, go in for them
myself. Take those little chiffon--"

And so the dear old lady went on into an enthusiastic disquisition on
the glories of dress that was so intimately feminine that I hesitate
to attempt to quote her words in this place, knowing little as I do on
the subject, and hardly able myself to tell the difference between a
gimp and a cafe parfait. I will merely close this chapter by quoting
Eve's last remark on the subject.

"All I can say is," she observed, "that Adam makes a great mistake in
objecting to woman's thinking so much about her clothes, for I can
tell him that if she didn't think about her own clothes she would
begin to think about his, and if that were to happen it wouldn't be
long before all men in creation would be going about looking as if
somebody had picked them off a