hose unhappy
pet dogs who look as though they had been put in curl papers overnight and
sent out into the streets by their owners as a poor jest. Yes, I think it
must be that sense of artificiality which is at the root of the dislike. No
doubt the curls are natural. No doubt the woolly sheep of Astrakhan do wear
their coats in these little heaven-sent ringlets. But ... well ... "I do
not like thee, Doctor Fell."

But fur-lined coats, with fine fur collars, are quite another affair. If I
had the "magic nib," I could grow lyrical over them. I could, indeed. In
place-of this article I would write an ode to a fur-lined coat. I would
sing of the Asian wilds from whence it came, of its wondrous lines and its
soft and silken texture, of its generous warmth and its caressing touch. I
would set up such a universal hunger for fur coats that the tradesmen in
Oxford Street and Regent Street would come and offer me a guinea a word to
write advertisements for them.

And yet I shall not buy a fur-lined coat, and I will tell you why. A fur
coat is not an article of clothing: it is a new way of life. You cannot say
with reckless prodigality, "Here, I will have a fur coat and make an end of
this gnawing passion." The fur coat is not an end: it is a beginning. You
have got to live up to it. You have got to take the fur-coat point of view
of your relations to society. When Chauncey Depew, as a boy, bought a
beautiful spotted dog at a fair and took it home, the rain came down and
the spots began to run into stripes. He took the dog back to the man of
whom he had bought it and demanded an explanation. "But you had an umbrella
with that dog," said the man. "No," said the boy. "Oh!" said the man,
"there's an umbrella goes with that dog."

And so it is with the fur-lined coat. So many things "go with it." It is in
this respect like that grand piano to which you succumbed in a moment of
paternal weakness--or after a lucky stroke in rubber. The old furniture,
which had seemed so unexceptionable before, suddenly became dowdy in the
presence of this princely affair. You wanted new chairs and rugs and
hangings to make the piano accord with its setting. Even the house fell
under suspicion, and perhaps you date all your difficulties from the day
that you bought that grand piano, and found that it had set you going on a
new way of life just beyond your modest means.

If I bought a fur-lined coat I know that I should want to buy a motor-car
to keep i