ty of
life and the emptiness of fashion. She longed to make the world better,
and without any priggishness she set it an example of simplicity and
sobriety, of cheerful acquiescence in plainness and inconspicuousness.

One day--it was in the autumn--this lady had occasion to buy a new hat.
From a great number offered to her she selected a red one with a dull red
plume. It did not agree with the rest of her apparel; it did not fit her
apparent character. What impulse led to this selection she could not
explain. She was not tired of being good, but something in the jauntiness
of the hat and the color pleased her. If it were a temptation, she did
not intend to yield to it, but she thought she would take the hat home
and try it. Perhaps her nature felt the need of a little warmth. The hat
pleased her still more when she got it home and put it on and surveyed
herself in the mirror. Indeed, there was a new expression in her face
that corresponded to the hat. She put it off and looked at it. There was
something almost humanly winning and temptatious in it. In short, she
kept it, and when she wore it abroad she was not conscious of its
incongruity to herself or to her dress, but of the incongruity of the
rest of her apparel to the hat, which seemed to have a sort of
intelligence of its own, at least a power of changing and conforming
things to itself. By degrees one article after another in the lady's
wardrobe was laid aside, and another substituted for it that answered to
the demanding spirit of the hat. In a little while this plain lady was
not plain any more, but most gorgeously dressed, and possessed with the
desire to be in the height of the fashion. It came to this, that she had
a tea-gown made out of a window-curtain with a flamboyant pattern.
Solomon in all his glory would have been ashamed of himself in her
presence.

But this was not all. Her disposition, her ideas, her whole life, was
changed. She did not any more think of going about doing good, but of
amusing herself. She read nothing but stories in paper covers. In place
of being sedate and sober-minded, she was frivolous to excess; she spent
most of her time with women who liked to "frivol." She kept Lent in the
most expensive way, so as to make the impression upon everybody that she
was better than the extremest kind of Lent. From liking the sedatest
company she passed to liking the gayest society and the most fashionable
method of getting rid of her time. Noth