hair. The Blue-stocking, constantly running her nervous fingers up her
forehead into her hair, has given to Girton a style of its own,
equivalent to none at all. _Fashion_ is more sensible than most things.
If it changes with a rapidity that dazzles man, is not that only because
man is stupid?

To study hair-dressing in du Maurier's pictures, is to study the growth
of the nineteenth-century woman's mind. The head-dress becomes more
natural as woman herself becomes more natural. It becomes more Greek
when she takes up the Amazon idea, and simple when she discards some of
the complications of convention, always to return to elaboration in the
winter when it is not easy to live the simple life after the bell goes
for dinner.

When the crinoline went out the train came in; so that though woman had
allowed _herself_ more freedom, man could only walk behind her at a
respectful distance with a ceremonial measure of pace. The dressmaker
did not control all this; the resources of her transcendent art were
strained to keep up with the march of womanhood--that was all. If we may
believe du Maurier's art, the note of beauty never entirely disappeared
from _fashion_ until the æsthetic women of the eighties seemed to take
in hand their own clothes. The æsthetic ladies failed, as the movement
to which they attached themselves did, for beauty is something attendant
upon life, arriving when it likes, going away very often when everyone
is on his knees for it to remain.

[Illustration]


§3