wever diplomatically, to suggest to her that a
simpler, more businesslike garb than the garb she favors would be the
sane and the sensible thing for business wear in business hours. And
then just see what happens.

A working woman who, through the working day, dresses in plain, neat
frocks with no jangling bracelets upon her arms, no foolish furbelows at
her wrists, no vain adornments about her throat, no exaggerated
coiffure, is a delight to the eye and, better still, she fits the
setting of her environment. Two of the most competent and dependable
human beings I know are both of them women. One is the assistant editor
of a weekly magazine. The other is the head of an important department
in an important industry. In the evening you would never find a woman
better groomed or, if the occasion demand, more ornately rigged-out than
either one of these young women will be. But always, while on duty, they
wear a correct and proper costume for the work they are doing, and they
match the picture. These two, though, are, I think, exceptions to the
rule of their sex.

Trained nurses wear the most becoming uniforms, and the most suitable,
considering their calling, that were ever devised. To the best of my
knowledge and belief there is no record where a marriageable male
patient on the road to recovery and in that impressionable mood which
accompanies the convalescence of an ordinarily healthy man, failed to
fall in love with his nurse. A competent, professional nurse who has the
added advantage on her side of being comely--and it is powerfully hard
for her to avoid being comely in her spotless blue and starchy
white--stands more chances of getting the right sort of man for a
husband than any billionaire's daughter alive.

But I sometimes wonder what weird sartorial eccentricities some of them
would indulge in did not convention and the standing laws of their
profession require of them that they all dress after a given pattern.
And if the owners and managers of big city shops once lifted the rule
prescribing certain modes for their female working staffs--if they
should give their women clerks a free hand in choosing their own
wardrobes for store hours--well, you know how women are!

Nevertheless and to the contrary notwithstanding, I will admit while I
am on this phase of my topic that there likewise is something to be said
in dispraise of my own sex too. In the other--and better half of this
literary double sketch-team act,