munities which are substantially least modern. Survivals of this
lackadaisical or romantic ideal occur freely in the tastes of the
well-to-do classes of Continental countries. In modern communities which
have reached the higher levels of industrial development, the upper
leisure class has accumulated so great a mass of wealth as to place its
women above all imputation of vulgarly productive labor. Here the status
of women as vicarious consumers is beginning to lose its place in the
sections of the body of the people; and as a consequence the ideal of
feminine beauty is beginning to change back again from the infirmly
delicate, translucent, and hazardously slender, to a woman of the
archaic type that does not disown her hands and feet, nor, indeed, the
other gross material facts of her person. In the course of economic
development the ideal of beauty among the peoples of the Western culture
has shifted from the woman of physical presence to the lady, and it is
beginning to shift back again to the woman; and all in obedience to the
changing conditions of pecuniary emulation. The exigencies of emulation
at one time required lusty slaves; at another time they required a
conspicuous performance of vicarious leisure and consequently an obvious
disability; but the situation is now beginning to outgrow this last
requirement, since, under the higher efficiency of modern industry,
leisure in women is possible so far down the scale of reputability that
it will no longer serve as a definitive mark of the highest pecuniary
grade.

Apart from this general control exercised by the norm of conspicuous
waste over the ideal of feminine beauty, there are one or two details
which merit specific mention as showing how it may exercise an extreme
constraint in detail over men's sense of beauty in women. It has
already been noticed that at the stages of economic evolution at which
conspicuous leisure is much regarded as a means of good repute, the
ideal requires delicate and diminutive bands and feet and a slender
waist. These features, together with the other, related faults of
structure that commonly go with them, go to show that the person so
affected is incapable of useful effort and must therefore be supported
in idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive, and she is
consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength. It results that
at this cultural stage women take thought to alter their persons, so as
to conform more near