e?"
"Yes." "A good home?" "Yes." "For what did you want money?" "Clothes."

"Gee, but I felt as if I would give anything for one of them willow
plumes," a pretty sixteen-year-old girl told the police matron who had
rescued her from a man with whom she had left home, because he
promised her silk gowns and hats with feathers.

This ugly preoccupation with dress does not begin with the bottom of
society. It exists there because it exists at the top and filters
down. In each successive layer there are women to whom dress is as
much of a vice as it was for the poor little girls I quote above. It
is a vice curiously parallel to that of gambling among men. Women of
great wealth not infrequently spend princely allowances and then run
accounts which come into the courts by their inability or
unwillingness to pay them. It is curious comment on women in a
democracy that it should be possible to mention them in the same
breath with Josephine, Empress of the French. Napoleon at the
beginning of the Empire allowed Josephine $72,000 a year for her
toilet; later he made it $90,000. But there was never a year she did
not far outstrip the allowance. Masson declares that on an average she
spent $220,000 a year, and the itemized accounts of the articles in
her wardrobe give authority for the amount.

Josephine's case is of course exceptional in history. She was an
untrained woman, generous and pleasure-loving, utterly without a sense
of responsibility. She had all the instincts and habits of a
demi-mondaine; moreover, she had been thrust into a position where she
was expected to live up to traditions of great magnificence. Her
passion for ornament had every temptation and excuse, for it was
constantly excited by the hoards of greedy tradesmen and of no less
greedy ladies-in-waiting who hung about her urging her to buy and
give. It is hard to believe that Josephine's case could be even
remotely suggested in our democracy; yet one woman in American
society bought last summer in Europe a half-dozen nightgowns for which
she paid a thousand dollars apiece. There are women who will start on
a journey with a hundred or a hundred and fifty pairs of shoes. There
are others who bring back from Europe forty or fifty new gowns for a
season! What can one think of a bill of $500 for stockings in one
season, of $20,000 for a season's gowns, coats and hats from one shop
and as much more in the aggregate for the same articles in the same
period from ot