WHAT SHE WORE

Somewhere in your story you must pause to describe your heroine's
costume. It is a ticklish task. The average reader likes his
heroine well dressed. He is not satisfied with knowing that she
looked like a tall, fair lily. He wants to be told that her gown
was of green crepe, with lace ruffles that swirled at her feet.
Writers used to go so far as to name the dressmaker; and it was a
poor kind of a heroine who didn't wear a red velvet by Worth. But
that has been largely abandoned in these days of commissions.
Still, when the heroine goes out on the terrace to spoon after
dinner (a quaint old English custom for the origin of which see any
novel by the "Duchess," page 179) the average reader wants to know
what sort of a filmy wrap she snatches up on the way out. He
demands a description, with as many illustrations as the publisher
will stand for, of what she wore from the bedroom to the street,
with full stops for the ribbons on her robe de nuit, and the
buckles on her ballroom slippers. Half the poor creatures one sees
flattening their noses against the shop windows are authors getting
a line on the advance fashions. Suppose a careless writer were to
dress his heroine in a full-plaited skirt only to find, when his
story is published four months later, that full-plaited skirts have
been relegated to the dim past!

I started to read a story once. It was a good one. There was
in it not a single allusion to brandy-and-soda, or divorce, or the
stock market. The dialogue crackled. The hero talked like a live
man. It was a shipboard story, and the heroine was charming so
long as she wore her heavy ulster. But along toward evening she
blossomed forth in a yellow gown, with a scarlet poinsettia at her