just how the
front parlor is furnished, and the amount of mortgage there is upon the
house. These facts get in the way of a clear and unbiassed judgment;
they impede the democratic relationship and add to the
self-consciousness of all concerned. Every one who has had to do with
down-town girls' clubs has had the experience of going into the home of
some bright, well-dressed girl, to discover it uncomfortable and perhaps
wretched, and to find the girl afterward carefully avoiding her,
although the working girl may not have been at home when the call was
made, and the visitor may have carried herself with the utmost courtesy
throughout. In some very successful down-town clubs the home address is
not given at all, and only the "business address" is required. Have we
worked out our democracy further in regard to clothes than anything
else?

The charity visitor has been rightly brought up to consider it vulgar to
spend much money upon clothes, to care so much for "appearances." She
realizes dimly that the care for personal decoration over that for one's
home or habitat is in some way primitive and undeveloped; but she is
silenced by its obvious need. She also catches a glimpse of the fact
that the disproportionate expenditure of the poor in the matter of
clothes is largely due to the exclusiveness of the rich who hide from
them the interior of their houses, and their more subtle pleasures,
while of necessity exhibiting their street clothes and their street
manners. Every one who goes shopping at the same time may see the
clothes of the richest women in town, but only those invited to her
receptions see the Corot on her walls or the bindings in her library.
The poor naturally try to bridge the difference by reproducing the
street clothes which they have seen. They are striving to conform to a
common standard which their democratic training presupposes belongs to
all of us. The charity visitor may regret that the Italian peasant
woman has laid aside her picturesque kerchief and substituted a cheap
street hat. But it is easy to recognize the first attempt toward
democratic expression.

The charity visitor finds herself still more perplexed when she comes to
consider such problems as those of early marriage and child labor; for
she cannot deal with them according to economic theories, or according
to the conventions which have regulated her own life. She finds both of
these fairly upset by her intimate knowledge of the situati