hat, had they ever had the smallest idea of going to
church and Sunday school, as our good girls do, they would immediately
have devised toilets appropriate to such exigencies. If it were any
part of their plan of life to appear statedly in public to confess
themselves 'miserable sinners,' we should doubtless have sent over
here the design of some graceful penitential habit, which would give
our places of worship a much more appropriate air than they now have.
As it is, it would form a subject for such a court of inquiry and
adaptation as we have supposed, to draw a line between the costume of
the theatre and the church.

"In the same manner, there is a want of appropriateness in the
costume of our American women, who display in the street promenade
a style of dress and adornment originally intended for showy
carriage drives in such great exhibition grounds as the Bois de
Boulogne. The makers of Parisian fashions are not generally walkers.
They do not, with all their extravagance, have the bad taste to
trail yards of silk and velvet over the mud and dirt of a pavement,
or promenade the street in a costume so pronounced and striking as
to draw the involuntary glance of every eye; and the showy toilets
displayed on the _pave_ by American young women have more than once
exposed them to misconstruction in the eyes of foreign observers.

"Next to appropriateness, the second requisite to beauty in dress I
take to be unity of effect. In speaking of the arrangement of rooms in
the 'House and Home Papers,' I criticised some apartments wherein
were many showy articles of furniture, and much expense had been
incurred, because, with all this, there was no _unity of result_. The
carpet was costly, and in itself handsome; the paper was also in
itself handsome and costly; the tables and chairs also in themselves
very elegant; and yet, owing to a want of any unity of idea, any grand
harmonizing tint of color, or method of arrangement, the rooms had a
jumbled, confused air, and nothing about them seemed particularly
pretty or effective. I instanced rooms where thousands of dollars had
been spent, which, because of this defect, never excited admiration;
and others in which the furniture was of the cheapest description, but
which always gave immediate and universal pleasure. The same rule
holds good in dress. As in every apartment, so in every toilet, there
should be one ground-tone or dominant color, which should rule all the
others, a