ris bored her.

"What can you do to pass the time?" she asked. I innocently answered
that I knew nothing so entrancing as long mornings passed at the Louvre.

"Oh, yes, I do that too," she replied, "but I like the 'Bon Marche'
best!"

A trip abroad has become a purely social function to a large number of
wealthy Americans, including "presentation" in London and a winter in
Rome or Cairo. And just as a "smart" Englishman is sure to tell you that
he has never visited the "Tower," it has become good form to ignore the
sight-seeing side of Europe; hundreds of New Yorkers never seeing
anything of Paris beyond the Rue de la Paix and the Bois. They would as
soon think of going to Cluny or St. Denis as of visiting the museum in
our park!

Such people go to Fontainebleau because they are buying furniture, and
they wish to see the best models. They go to Versailles on the coach and
"do" the Palace during the half-hour before luncheon. Beyond that,
enthusiasm rarely carries them. As soon as they have settled themselves
at the Bristol or the Rhin begins the endless treadmill of leaving cards
on all the people just seen at home, and whom they will meet again in a
couple of months at Newport or Bar Harbor. This duty and the
all-entrancing occupation of getting clothes fills up every spare hour.
Indeed, clothes seem to pervade the air of Paris in May, the conversation
rarely deviating from them. If you meet a lady you know looking ill, and
ask the cause, it generally turns out to be "four hours a day standing to
be fitted." Incredible as it may seem, I have been told of one plain
maiden lady, who makes a trip across, spring and autumn, with the sole
object of getting her two yearly outfits.

Remembering the hundreds of cultivated people whose dream in life (often
unrealized from lack of means) has been to go abroad and visit the scenes
their reading has made familiar, and knowing what such a trip would mean
to them, and how it would be looked back upon during the rest of an
obscure life, I felt it almost a duty to "suppress" a wealthy female
(doubtless an American cousin of Lady Midas) when she informed me, the
other day, that decidedly she would not go abroad this spring.

"It is not necessary. Worth has my measures!"

No. 4--The Outer and the Inner Woman

It is a sad commentary on our boasted civilization that cases of
shoplifting occur more and more frequently each year, in which the
delinquents are women