and run up a
milliner's bill beyond what she can afford for the whole family living.
If they can buy gold, she can manage pinchbeck; glass that looks like
jet, like filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is every bit to
her as good as the real thing; and if she cannot compass Valenciennes
and Mechlin, she can go to Nottingham and buy machine-made imitations
that will make quite as fine a show. How poor soever she may be, she
must hang herself about with ornaments made of painted wood, glass, or
vulcanite; she must break out into spangles and beads and chains and
_benoitons_, which are cheap luxuries, and, as she thinks, effective.
Flimsy silks make as rich a rustle to her ear as the stateliest brocade,
and cotton-velvet delights the soul that cannot aspire to Genoa. The
love of pinchbeck is so deeply ingrained in her that even if, in a
momentary fit of aberration into good taste, she condescends to a simple
material about which there can be neither disguise nor pretence, she
must load it with that detestable cheap finery of hers till she makes
herself as vulgar in a muslin as she was in a cotton velvet.

The _simplex munditiis_, which used to be held as a canon of feminine
good taste, is now abandoned altogether, and the more she can bedizen
herself according to the pattern of a Sandwich islander the more
beautiful she thinks herself, the more certain the fascination of the
men, and the greater the jealousy of the women. This is the cause of all
the tags and streamers, the bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces
there, the puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off some dead
girl's head, wherewith the modern Englishwoman delights to make herself
hideous. It is pinchbeck throughout. But we fear she is past praying for
in the matter of fashion, and that she is too far given over to the
abomination of pretence to be called back to truth for any ethical
reason whatsoever, or indeed by anything short of high examples. And
then, if simplicity became the fashion, we should have our pinchbeck
votaries translating that into extremes as they do now with
ornamentation; if my lady took to plainness, they would go to
nakedness.

Another bit of pinchbeck is the visiting-list--the cards of invitation
stuck against the drawing-room glass--with the grandest names and
largest fortunes put forward, irrespective of dates or tenses. The
chance contact with the people represented may be quite out of the
ordinary circ