omed, dressed into a condition of
vivid self-consciousness. The same people, who know each other
perfectly well, will enjoy themselves together without restraint in
their ordinary apparel. But nothing can be more artificial than the
behavior of people together who rarely "dress up." It seems
impossible to make the conversation as fine as the clothes, and so it
dies in a kind of inane helplessness. Especially is this true in the
country, where people have not obtained the mastery of their clothes
that those who live in the city have. It is really absurd, at this
stage of our civilization, that we should be so affected by such an
insignificant accident as dress. Perhaps Mandeville can tell us
whether this clothes panic prevails in the older societies.

THE PARSON. Don't. We've heard it; about its being one of the
Englishman's thirty-nine articles that he never shall sit down to
dinner without a dress-coat, and all that.

THE MISTRESS. I wish, for my part, that everybody who has time to
eat a dinner would dress for that, the principal event of the day,
and do respectful and leisurely justice to it.

THE YOUNG LADY. It has always seemed singular to me that men who
work so hard to build elegant houses, and have good dinners, should
take so little leisure to enjoy either.

MANDEVILLE. If the Parson will permit me, I should say that the
chief clothes question abroad just now is, how to get any; and it is
the same with the dinners.

II

It is quite unnecessary to say that the talk about clothes ran into
the question of dress-reform, and ran out, of course. You cannot
converse on anything nowadays that you do not run into some reform.
The Parson says that everybody is intent on reforming everything but
himself. We are all trying to associate ourselves to make everybody
else behave as we do. Said--

OUR NEXT DOOR. Dress reform! As if people couldn't change their
clothes without concert of action. Resolved, that nobody should put
on a clean collar oftener than his neighbor does. I'm sick of every
sort of reform. I should like to retrograde awhile. Let a dyspeptic
ascertain that he can eat porridge three times a day and live, and
straightway he insists that everybody ought to eat porridge and
nothing else. I mean to get up a society every member of which shall
be pledged to do just as he pleases.

THE PARSON. That would be the most radical reform of the day. That
would be independence. If people dressed according t