e see you in party trim."

"I beg pardon, my dear; I am not converted to the fashion, but to you,
and that is a point on which I didn't need conversion; but the present
fashions, even so fairly represented as I see them, I humbly confess I
dislike."

"O Mr. Crowfield!"

"Yes, my dears, I do. But then, I protest, I'm not fairly treated. I
think, for a young American girl, who looks as most of my fair friends
do look, to come down with her bright eyes and all her little panoply of
graces upon an old fellow like me, and expect him to like a fashion
merely because _she_ looks well in it, is all sheer nonsense. Why,
girls, if you wore rings in your noses, and bangles on your arms up to
your elbows, if you tied your hair in a war-knot on the top of your
heads like the Sioux Indians, you would look pretty still. The question
isn't, as I view it, whether you look pretty,--for that you do and that
you will, do what you please and dress how you will. The question is
whether you might not look prettier, whether another style of dress, and
another mode of getting up, would not be far more becoming. I am one who
thinks that it would."

"Now, Mr. Crowfield, you positively are too bad," said
Humming-Bird,--whose delicate head was encircled by a sort of crapy
cloud of bright hair, sparkling with gold-dust and spangles, in the
midst of which, just over her forehead, a gorgeous blue butterfly was
perched, while a confused mixture of hairs, gold-powder, spangles,
stars, and tinkling ornaments fell in a sort of cataract down her pretty
neck. "You see, we girls think everything of you; and now we don't like
it that you don't like our fashions."

"Why, my little princess, so long as I like _you_ better than your
fashions, and merely think they are not worthy of you, what's the harm?"

"O yes, to be sure. You sweeten the dose to us babies with that
sugar-plum. But really, Mr. Crowfield, why don't you like the fashions?"

"Because, to my view, they are in great part in false taste, and injure
the beauty of the girls," said I. "They are inappropriate to their
characters, and make them look like a kind and class of women whom they
do not, and I trust never will, resemble internally, and whose mark
therefore they ought not to bear externally. But there you are,
beguiling me into a sermon which you will only hate me in your hearts
for preaching. Go along, children! You certainly look as well as anybody
can in that style of getting up; so g