ite the
same men again afterwards.

Sometimes I sit wondering if I hear his scratching at the door.

THE MINOR POET'S STORY

"It doesn't suit you at all," I answered.

"You're very disagreeable," said she, "I shan't ever ask your advice
again."

"Nobody," I hastened to add, "would look well in it. You, of course,
look less awful in it than any other woman would, but it's not your
style."

"He means," exclaimed the Minor Poet, "that the thing itself not being
pre-eminently beautiful, it does not suit, is not in agreement with you.
The contrast between you and anything approaching the ugly or the
commonplace, is too glaring to be aught else than displeasing."

"He didn't say it," replied the Woman of the World; "and besides it isn't
ugly. It's the very latest fashion."

"Why is it," asked the Philosopher, "that women are such slaves to
fashion? They think clothes, they talk clothes, they read clothes, yet
they have never understood clothes. The purpose of dress, after the
primary object of warmth has been secured, is to adorn, to beautify the
particular wearer. Yet not one woman in a thousand stops to consider
what colours will go best with her complexion, what cut will best hide
the defects or display the advantages of her figure. If it be the
fashion, she must wear it. And so we have pale-faced girls looking
ghastly in shades suitable to dairy-maids, and dots waddling about in
costumes fit and proper to six-footers. It is as if crows insisted on
wearing cockatoo's feathers on their heads, and rabbits ran about with
peacocks' tails fastened behind them."

"And are not you men every bit as foolish?" retorted the Girton Girl.
"Sack coats come into fashion, and dumpy little men trot up and down in
them, looking like butter-tubs on legs. You go about in July melting
under frock-coats and chimney-pot hats, and because it is the stylish
thing to do, you all play tennis in still shirts and stand-up collars,
which is idiotic. If fashion decreed that you should play cricket in a
pair of top-boots and a diver's helmet, you would play cricket in a pair
of top-boots and a diver's helmet, and dub every sensible fellow who
didn't a cad. It's worse in you than in us; men are supposed to think
for themselves, and to be capable of it, the womanly woman isn't."

"Big women and little men look well in nothing," said the Woman of the
World. "Poor Emily was five foot ten and a half, and never looked an
inch u