the stars of fashion. She imports
patterns, and they become the mode; her caterer invents dishes, and they
are copied throughout the obeisant world. There are confections _a la_
Colisle; the confectioners utter new editions of them. There is a
Colisle head-dress, a Colisle pomade, a Colisle hat,--the world wears
and uses them. Thus, Mrs. Colisle has set herself up as Mrs. Belle
Etoile's rival; and that unfortunate lady, compelled by those
_noblesse-oblige_ principles which control the chivalry of fashion,
takes up the unequal gage, and enters the lists against her. The result
is, that Mrs. Belle Etoile has become the veriest slave in Christendom.
Whatever the other woman's whims and extravagances, Mrs. Belle Etoile is
their victim. Her taste revolts, but her pride of place compels
obedience. She cannot yield, she will not follow; and so Mrs. Colisle,
with diabolical ingenuity, constrains her to run a course that gives her
no honor and pays her no compensation. She scorns Mrs. Colisle's ways,
she loathes her fashions and her company, and--outbids her for them! It
is a very unequal contest, of course. Defeat only inspires Mrs. Colisle
with a more stubborn persistence. Victory cannot lessen the sad regrets
of Mrs. Belle Etoile's soul for outraged instincts and insulted taste.
It is an ill match,--a strife between greyhound and mastiff, a contest
at heavy draught between a thoroughbred and a Flanders mare. Mrs. Etoile
knows this as well as you and I can possibly know it. She is perfectly
aware of her serfdom. She is poignantly conscious of the degrading
character of her servitude, and that it is not possible to gather grapes
of thorns, nor figs of thistles; and yet she will continue to wage the
unequal strife, to wear the unhandsome fetters, simply because she has
not the courage to extricate herself from the false position into which
the strategic arts of Fashion have inveigled her.

Now I do not intend to moralize. I have no purpose to frighten the
reader prematurely off to the next page by unmasking a formidable
battery of reflections and admonitions. I have merely instanced the
above cases, three or four among a thousand of such as must have
presented themselves to the attention of each one of us; and I adduce
them simply as examples of what I call "bad symptoms" in any diagnosis
of the state of the social frame. They indicate, in fact, a total
absence of _social courage_ in persons otherwise endowed with and
illustriou