implicity, plainness, freedom from all display. A French lady
wears in her hair at the Opera a single, simple tiara bound with a plain
row of solitaire diamonds. It is so exquisitely simple in its outline
that you can see the single diamonds sticking out from it and can count
up the price of each. The Parisian gentleman wears in his button-hole
merely a single orchid,--not half a dozen,--and pins his necktie with
one plain, ordinary ruby, set in a perfectly unostentatious sunburst of
sapphires. There is no doubt of the superiority of this Parisian
simplicity. To me, when it broke upon me in reading _La Mode
Parisienne_, it came as a kind of inspiration. I took away the stuffy
black ribbon with its stupidly elaborate knot from my Canadian Christie
hat and wound a single black ostrich feather about it fastened with just
the plainest silver aigrette. When I had put that on and pinned a piece
of old lace to the tail of my coat with just one safety pin, I walked
the street with the quiet dignity of a person whose one idea is not to
be conspicuous.

But this is a digression. The child, I was saying, wears about two
hundred worth of visible clothing upon it; and I believe that if you
were to take it up by its ten-dollar slipper and hold it upside down,
you would see about fifty dollars more. The French child has been
converted into an elaborately dressed doll. It is altogether a thing of
show, an appendage of its fashionably dressed mother, with frock and
parasol to match. It is no longer a child, but a living toy or
plaything.

Even on these terms the child is not a success. It has a rival who is
rapidly beating it off the ground. This is the Parisian dog. As an
implement of fashion, as a set-off to the fair sex, as the recipient of
ecstatic kisses and ravishing hugs, the Parisian dog can give the child
forty points in a hundred and win out. It can dress better, look more
intelligent, behave better, bark better,--in fact, the child is simply
not in it.

[Illustration: The Parisian dog.]

This is why, I suppose, in the world of Parisian luxury, the dog is
ousting the infant altogether. You will see, as I said, no children on
the boulevards and avenues. You will see dogs by the hundred. Every
motor or open barouche that passes up the Champs Elysees, with its
little white cloud of fluffy parasols and garden-hats, has a dainty,
beribboned dog sitting among its occupants: in every avenue and
promenade you will see hundreds of