something almost humanly winning and temptatious in it. In short, she
kept it, and when she wore it abroad she was not conscious of its
incongruity to herself or to her dress, but of the incongruity of the
rest of her apparel to the hat, which seemed to have a sort of
intelligence of its own, at least a power of changing and conforming
things to itself. By degrees one article after another in the lady's
wardrobe was laid aside, and another substituted for it that answered to
the demanding spirit of the hat. In a little while this plain lady was
not plain any more, but most gorgeously dressed, and possessed with the
desire to be in the height of the fashion. It came to this, that she had
a tea-gown made out of a window-curtain with a flamboyant pattern.
Solomon in all his glory would have been ashamed of himself in her
presence.

But this was not all. Her disposition, her ideas, her whole life, was
changed. She did not any more think of going about doing good, but of
amusing herself. She read nothing but stories in paper covers. In place
of being sedate and sober-minded, she was frivolous to excess; she spent
most of her time with women who liked to "frivol." She kept Lent in the
most expensive way, so as to make the impression upon everybody that she
was better than the extremest kind of Lent. From liking the sedatest
company she passed to liking the gayest society and the most fashionable
method of getting rid of her time. Nothing whatever had happened to her,
and she is now an ornament to society.

This story is not an invention; it is a leaf out of life. If this lady
that autumn day had bought a plain bonnet she would have continued on in
her humble, sensible way of living. Clearly it was the hat that made the
woman, and not the woman the hat. She had no preconception of it; it
simply happened to her, like any accident--as if she had fallen and