discouraging it is to wear your good clothes for unappreciative men,
they beg me not to be guilty of the heresy of wishing things
different. If they have married one of the noticing kind, they tell me
harrowing tales of gorgeous costumes having been cast aside because
these critical men made fun of, or were prejudiced against them, and
"made remarks." And they point with envy to Mrs. So-and-So, whose
husband never knows what she has on, but who thinks she looks lovely
in everything, so that she is at liberty to dress as she pleases. When
a woman defers to her husband's taste, she sometimes is the
best-dressed woman in the room. And sometimes another woman, dressing
according to another man's taste, is the worst-dressed. So you see you
never can tell. "De mule don't kick 'cordin' to no rule."

There is something rather pathetic to me about a man being so ignorant
of why a woman's dress is beautiful, but only the effect remaining in
his memory. He remembers how she looked on a certain day in a certain
gown. He thinks he remembers her dress. He thinks he would know it
again if he saw it. But the truth is that he is remembering the woman
herself, her face, her voice, her eyes--above all, what she said, and
how she said it. If she wore a scarlet ribbon in her dark hair, a red
rose in another woman's hair will most unaccountably bring it all back
to him, and he will not know why he suddenly sees the whole picture
rise out of the past before his eyes, nor why his throat aches with
the memory of it.

I know one of these men, whose descriptions of a woman's dress are one
of the experiences of a lifetime. He loves the word bombazine. His
mother must have worn a gown of black bombazine during his
impressionable age. And he never will be successful in describing a
modern gown until bombazines again become the rage. This same dear man