adame at first found so bright--they are but the colors of a summer
flower garden. What would Madame wear in a flower garden? Black crepe de
chine? Assuredly not! See this shell pink chiffon, how lovely it would
look under trees of apple blossoms. Blue serge! Oh, what an escape. And
now if Madame will permit me to suggest?--the green, but assuredly! and
the orange and coral, and the pink chiffon garden dress, and the zebra,
for travelling, and the blue and silver...."

However, to be serious, people do go to Paris and buy their
clothes--beautiful clothes! Of course they do; especially those who go
every year. But the woman who goes abroad perhaps every four or five years
is apt to be deficient in a trans-Atlantic sense. "Match backgrounds, like
charming little animals?" Never! Oh, a very big Never Again! And yet the
next time shall you not find it a temptation to go just out of curiosity
to find out what the newest artfully enticing little tune of the Pied
Pipers of Paris will be!

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE CLOTHES OF A GENTLEMAN

It would seem that some of our great clothing establishments, with an eye
to our polyglot ancestry, have attempted to incorporate some feature of
every European national costume into a "harmonious" whole, and have thus
given us that abiding horror, the freak American suit. You will see it
everywhere, on Broadway of every city and Main Street of every town, on
the boardwalks and beaches of coast resorts, and even in remote farming
villages. It comes up to hit you in the face year after year in all its
amazing variations: waist-line under the arm pits, "trick" little belts,
what-nots in the cuffs; trousers so narrow you fear they will burst before
your eyes, pockets placed in every position, buttons clustered together in
a tight little row or reduced to one. And the worst of it is, few of our
younger men know any better until they go abroad and find their wardrobe a
subject for jest and derision.

If you would dress like a gentleman, you must do one of two things; either
study the subject of a gentleman's wardrobe until you are competent to
pick out good suits from freaks and direct your misguided tailor, or, at
least until your perceptions are trained, go to an English one. This
latter method is the easiest, and, by all odds, the safest. It is not
Anglomania but plain common sense to admit that, just as the Rue de la
Paix in Paris is the fountainhead of fashions for women, Bond Street in