the man who clerked at Cash & Silk's nor the one who pays his wife's
bills in Paris, but the man in his native state of charming ignorance
of materials; the man who always suggests a "gusset" as a remedy for
too scant a gown, who calls insertion "tatting," and who, in setting
out for the opera, will tell his wife to put on her "bonnet and
shawl," although she may have on point-lace and diamonds. In his more
modern aspect he tells you that a girl at the Junior Promenade had on
a blue dress with feathers around her neck--which you must translate
into meaning anything from blue satin to organdie, and that between
dances she wore a feather boa.

It is the effect only that men take in; and when a man goes into
ecstasies over a gown of pale green on a hot day just because you look
so cool and fresh in it, when you know that you paid but forty cents a
yard for it, and only nods when you show him your velvet and ermine
wrap, which cost you two hundred dollars, I would just like to ask you
if it pays to dress for him. Women know this from a sorrowful
experience. Girls have to learn it for themselves. A ball-dress of
white tarlatan, made up over white paper cambric, with a white sash,
will satisfy a man quite as well as a Paris muslin trimmed with a
hundred dollars' worth of Valenciennes lace and made up over silk.
Most of them would never know the difference.

I do not know whether to be sorry for these men or not. It must be
lovely not to agonize and plan and worry to have everything the best
of its kind. I would like to take in only the effect, and never know
why I was pleased. Too much analysis is death to unmitigated rapture.
You always are haunted by knowing exactly what is lacking, and just
how it could be remedied. But these dear men are singularly deluded in
many ways, and upon these delusions clever women play, as a master