ing our sleeves in style! Talk of our playing with scholarship or politics when we are all our days panting disheveled after scampering Dame Fashion, who, all our broken-winded lives, is just a little ahead! Yet dress-reform is the first article in our creed of antipathies, and I, for one, am last of ladies to declare myself a heretic. I am not ungrateful for the gift of sex and species. Suppose I were a fowl of the air,—what condemnation of hodden gray, and soul unexpressed either by vocal throat or personality of plumage! Among things furred or feathered it is the male who dresses and the lady who wears uniform; that it is otherwise with human beings is due, I suppose, to some freakish bit of chivalry on the part of the autocrat Evolution, the ring-master who puts the entire menagerie through their tricks. No, I would not be a fowl; let me not repine; let me at this business of dressing, pluckily.
Women are nobler than men; it is because we are purified in the fires of more severe temptation. Man does not encounter the demoralizing influence of the dressmaker, that creature with mouth of pins and suave words. To what degrading subterfuge are we not reduced to get our own way with the dressmaker, seeing with what delight and dexterity she lifts her spurning foot against our desires! Do we presume to know what we want to wear?—alternately she sporteth and scorneth—and yet we lift not against her her proper scissors. She practices dark arts; she runs an hypnotic finger along the seam, and the wrinkle is no more seen—until the dress comes home. Lies are about her head. Her promises are vanity, and her bills elastic as a fluted flounce. Counter-mendacity alone can move her; the gown must be sent home, for we attend a wedding in twenty minutes; even now the caterer “hath paced into the hall;” or we leave for California in an hour, and even now our sleeper paws the track. By the ways of unrighteousness alone may we be clothed, and yet so signal is female virtue that after centuries of dressmakers we are still unscathed in our integrity, and are still the church-goers of the species.
There is something stirring to contemplate in woman’s devotion to dress,—to see how we lay down health and comfort, and clamber up and frizzle for a lifetime on the altar of the esthetic. That is what our dressing is to us,—an art and an aspiration. If our sex doffed its radiance, and did on “blacks,” what loss to popular culture! What of the universal hunger for color and form if so many curiosities of craft, so many animated works of art no longer whisked about the streets of the world?
For another reason, also, we are preoccupied of our costume,—our invincible frankness; for we would have our clothes the expression of our souls. With what fondness we cling to the frock that suits us! Such a bundle of subtleties is woman that words are too gross—a black coat and trousers an insincerity—for the hundred shades of shifting color and form that we are inside. Though it take half our life, let us be true to our clothes, our clothes to us; let the dress be the lady, and the lady a symphony of soul and silk.
Verily, “my soul on its lone way” has traveled far from the days of babyhood, kicking against all wrappings, to the days of womanhood, when personality exists not, separate from frocks and hats and gloves and shoes, and both the inner layer of individuality and the outer layer of costume have become cosy and comfortable, so that by no means do I wish to lay them aside.
What next? Some day I shall be given into the hands of those who
“fashion the birth-robes for them
Who are just born, being dead.”
Shall I be again enfolded in garments all ready for me, of skyey tissues and opalescent tints? Shall I squirm and struggle again, and again be slowly subdued to the clothing and conventions of another world?
Or when I pop up the lid of this uphol-
