ear strings
of glass beads. A little higher, they would sacrifice the splendid shawl
to a rare marble, banish the chromo-lithograph, and turn the solitaire
ear-drops into a lovely picture, and build a conservatory with the price
of lace flounces. A little higher still, and we might have model
lodging-houses, and foundling hospitals, and music in the squares given
us by kindly women who had saved the money from milliner, and jeweller,
and silk-mercer.

But standing just where they are, clothes seem to these same undeveloped
women the best things money can buy; and a lack of culture confuses them
as to the attributes of clothes. Just now our fashionable women are
bitterly reprehended for copying the dress of the "Anonymas," who
establish the very pronounced fashions of Paris. Half of them do not
know what model they have taken. The other half accept the various and
tasteless costumes, not because they are devised by "Anonyma," but
because they are striking. There is something in the commonplaceness of
fashionable life which smothers all originality of thought, of action,
even of device in costume; and the women who give most time and money to
dress, to whom one would look for perfection in that mixed art, are
almost invariably the women who are exact reproductions of their
neighbors in this regard, as in their house-furnishing, their equipages,
and their manners.

Upon these splendidly monotonous fine ladies flashes the vision of
"Anonyma," with her meretricious beauty, and her daring toilettes.
Amenable to no social Mrs. Grundy, her love of dress develops itself in
bold contrasts of color, in bizarre and showy ornaments, in picturesque,
and often in grotesque and tawdry effects. But whatever the details, the
whole is always striking. Our women longing for the new, accept the
absurd; desiring the picturesque, take the bizarre, and eager for the
elegant, content themselves with the costly.

Nor does the fact that our present fashionable evening costume is
immodest, of necessity impugn the modesty of the women who wear it. That
they are wanting in fineness of perception must be admitted. But women
of fashion accept without question the dictum of their modistes. La
Belle Hamilton, the famous beauty of the reign of Charles the Second, so
delicately modest and pure that she passed unbreathed upon by scandal
through that most dissolute court, is painted in a costume that the
fastest of New York belles would not venture to we