nt because, on several occasions, when passing rainy
afternoons indoors, with some affluent little New York friends, whose
luxurious nurseries and marvellous mechanical toys were a delight,
always insisted upon returning home,--a block distant,--to change into
white before partaking of milk toast and jam, at the nursery table, the
American children keeping on their pink and blue linens of the
afternoon. The fact of white or pink is unimportant, but our point is
made when we have said that the mother of the American children
constantly remarked on the unconscious grace of the English tot, whether
in her white muslin and pink ribbons, her riding clothes, or
accordion-plaited dancing frock. The English woman-child was acquiring
decorative lines by wearing the correct costume for each occasion, as
naturally as a bird wears its feathers. This is one way of obviating
self-consciousness.

The Eton boy masters his stick and topper in the same way, when young,
and so more easily passes through the formless stage conspicuous in the
American youth.

Call it technique, or call it efficiency, the object of our modern life
is to excel, to be the best of our kind, and appropriate dress is a
means to that end, for it helps to liberate the spirit. We of to-day
make no claim to consistency or logic. Some of us wear too high heels,
even with strictly tailored suits, which demand in the name of
consistency a sensible shoe. Also our sensible skirt may be far too
narrow for comfort. But on the whole, women have made great strides in
the matter of costuming with a view to appropriateness and efficiency.

CHAPTER VI

COLOUR IN WOMAN'S COSTUME

Colour is the hall-mark of our day, and woman decoratively costumed, and
as decorator, will be largely responsible for recording this age as one
of distinct importance--a transition period in decoration.

Colour is the most marked expression of the spirit of the times; colour
in woman's clothes; colour in house furnishing; colour on the stage and
in its setting; colour in prose and verse.

Speaking of colour in verse, Rudyard Kipling says (we quote from an
editorial in the Philadelphia _Public Ledger_, Jan. 7, 1917):

"Several songs written by Tommy and the Poilu at the front, celebrate
the glories of camp life in such vivid colors they could not be
reproduced in cold, black, leaden type."

It is no mere chance, this use of vivid colour. Man's psychology to-day
craves it. A revolution