and frivolous emptiness,--but that our
girls are going to merit the high praise given us by De Tocqueville,
when he placed first among the causes of our prosperity the _noble
character of American women_. Because foolish female persons in New
York are striving to outdo the _demi-monde_ of Paris in extravagance,
it must not follow that every sensible and patriotic matron, and every
nice, modest young girl, must forthwith and without inquiry rush as
far after them as they possibly can. Because Mrs. Shoddy opens a ball
in a two-thousand-dollar lace dress, every girl in the land need not
look with shame on her modest white muslin. Somewhere between the fast
women of Paris and the daughters of Christian American families there
should be established a _cordon sanitaire_, to keep out the contagion
of manners, customs, and habits with which a noble-minded, religious
democratic people ought to have nothing to do."

"Well now, Mr. Crowfield," said the Dove, "since you speak us so fair,
and expect so much of us, we must of course try not to fall below
your compliments; but, after all, tell us what is the right standard
about dress. Now we have daily lectures about this at home. Aunt Maria
says that she never saw such times as these, when mothers and
daughters, church-members and worldly people, all seem to be going one
way, and sit down together and talk, as they will, on dress and
fashion,--how to have this made and that altered. We used to be
taught, she said, that church-members had higher things to think
of,--that their thoughts ought to be fixed on something better, and
that they ought to restrain the vanity and worldliness of children and
young people; but now, she says, even before a girl is born, dress is
the one thing needful,--the great thing to be thought of; and so, in
every step of the way upward, her little shoes, and her little
bonnets, and her little dresses, and her corals and her ribbons, are
constantly being discussed in her presence, as the one all-important
object of life. Aunt Maria thinks mamma is dreadful, because she has
maternal yearnings over our toilet successes and fortunes; and we
secretly think Aunt Maria is rather soured by old age, and has
forgotten how a girl feels."

"The fact is," said I, "that the love of dress and outside show has
been always such an exacting and absorbing tendency, that it seems to
have furnished work for religionists and economists, in all ages, to
keep it within bounds.