y and genteel appearance, with the help of occasional
presents from friends."

"How could a girl dress for fifty dollars?" said Marianne.

"She could get a white muslin and a white cambric, which, with
different sortings of ribbons, served her for all dress occasions. A
silk, in those days, took only ten yards in the making, and one dark
silk was considered a reasonable allowance to a lady's wardrobe. Once
made, it stood for something,--always worn carefully, it lasted for
years. One or two calico morning-dresses, and a merino for winter
wear, completed the list. Then, as to collars, capes, cuffs, etc., we
all did our own embroidering, and very pretty things we wore, too.
Girls looked as prettily then as they do now, when four or five
hundred dollars a year is insufficient to clothe them."

"But, mamma, you know our allowance isn't anything like that,--it is
quite a slender one, though not so small as yours was," said Marianne.
"Don't you think the customs of society make a difference? Do you
think, as things are, we could go back and dress for the sum you
did?"

"You cannot," said my wife, "without a greater sacrifice of feeling
than I wish to impose on you. Still, though I don't see how to help
it, I cannot but think that the requirements of fashion are becoming
needlessly extravagant, particularly in regard to the dress of women.
It seems to me, it is making the support of families so burdensome
that young men are discouraged from marriage. A young man, in a
moderately good business, might cheerfully undertake the world with a
wife who could make herself pretty and attractive for seventy-five
dollars a year, when he might sigh in vain for one who positively
could not get through, and be decent, on four hundred. Women, too, are
getting to be so attached to the trappings and accessories of life
that they cannot think of marriage without an amount of fortune which
few young men possess."

"You are talking in very low numbers about the dress of women," said
Miss Featherstone. "I do assure you that it is the easiest thing in
the world for a girl to make away with a thousand dollars a year, and
not have so much to show for it, either, as Marianne and Jenny."

"To be sure," said I. "Only establish certain formulas of expectation,
and it is the easiest thing in the world. For instance, in your
mother's day girls talked of a pair of gloves,--now they talk of a
pack; then it was a bonnet summer and winter,--now it is a