eration with a natural law. The
flexibility of their dress gives them every opportunity to modify,
to enhance, to reveal, and to conceal. It is in the highest degree
interpretative, and through it they express their aspirations and
ideals, their thirst for combat and their realization of defeat,
their fluctuating sentiments and their permanent predispositions.

"A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility."

Naturally, in a matter so vital, they are not disposed to listen to
reason, and they cannot be argued out of a great fundamental instinct.
Women are constitutionally incapable of being influenced by
argument,--a limitation which is in the nature of a safeguard. The
cunning words in which M. Marcel Provost urges them to follow the
example of men, sounds, to their ears, a little like the words in
which the fox which had lost its tail counsels its fellow foxes to
rid themselves of so despicable an appendage. "Before the
Revolution," writes M. Provost, in his "Lettres a Francois," "the
clothes worn by men of quality were more costly than those worn by
women. To-day all men dress with such uniformity that a Huron,
transported to Paris or to London, could not distinguish master from
valet. This will assuredly be the fate of feminine toilets in a future
more or less near. The time must come when the varying costumes now
seen at balls, at the races, at the theatre, will all be swept away;
and in their place women will wear, as men do, a species of uniform.
There will be a 'woman's suit,' costing sixty francs at Batignolles,
and five hundred francs in the rue de la Paix; and, this reform once
accomplished, it will never be possible to return to old conditions.
Reason will have triumphed."

Perhaps! But reason has been routed so often from the field that one
no longer feels confident of her success. M. Baudrillart had a world
of reason on his side when, before the Chamber of Deputies, he urged
reform in dress, and the legal suppression of jewels and costly
fabrics. M. de Lavaleye, the Belgian statist, was fortified by reason
when he proposed his grey serge uniform for women of all classes.
If we turn back a page or two of history, and look at the failure
of the sumptuary laws in England, we find the wives of London
tradesmen, who were not permitted to wear velvet in public, lining
their grogram gowns with this costly fabric, for t