ssing this winter. "At a _fete_ graced by all that is
elegant, refined, and aristocratic in Paris," he observed the duchess,
the countess, and the baroness imitating the costly toilettes of the
_demi-monde_, arrayed like one of them precisely, in the very height of
fashion. We are favored with a minute account of one representative
toilette in the room:--

"The lady is of a noble Hungarian family, fair, with that dark brown
reddish hair which is just going to begin to be golden, but never shines
out. Pale oval face, heavy eyebrows, bright bronze eyes. Small festoons
of hair over the brow, imprisoned by a golden metal band. Behind a
Bismarck chignon. A mass of twisted hair, in a sort of Laocoon agony,
was decorated with small insects (of course I don't mean anything
impossible), glittering gem-like beetles from the Brazils. Three long
curls hang from the imposing mass, and could be worn before or behind,
and be made to perform--as I witnessed--all sorts of coquettish
tricks. . . . Now for the dress. Well, there is nothing to describe till
you get very nearly down to the waist. A pretty bit of lace on a band
wanders over the shoulder; the back is bare very low down, and more of
the bust is seen than even last year's fashions permitted. . . . You
may, as far as I could observe, dress or half-dress just as you like;
caprice has taken the place of uniform fashion. As the panorama of
_grandes dames_ floats before my mind's eye, I come to the conclusion
that I have seen more of those ladies than one could have hoped or
expected in so brief a space of time."

This, then, is, or shortly will be, in a tasteless and exaggerated form,
the style of dress among those "ladies of distinction" whose
co-operation a "Clergyman's Wife" fondly hopes to enlist in her scheme
for purging the kitchen of its "disgraceful" finery. It is just possible
that she has not heard of these things. Perhaps in the retirement of the
parsonage, with her eyes intently fixed on the moral havoc which dress
is causing among "the lower orders of females," she has assumed that the
dress of the higher orders of females is irreproachably modest and
correct. If so, we are sorry to have to dispel an illusion which would
go far to justify the self-complacent tone of her lecture. But unless
she is blissfully ignorant of contemporary fashions in any sphere more
elevated than the kitchen, we are struck with astonishment at the
hardihood of an appeal at the present moment