my admired and talented friend, Mrs.
Mary Roberts Rinehart, cites chapter and verse to prove the
unaccountable vagaries of some men in the matter of dress. There she
made but one mistake--a mistake of under-estimation. She mentioned
specifically some men; she should have included all men.

The only imaginable reason why any rational he-biped of adult age clings
to the habiliments ordained for him by the custom and the tailors of
this generation, is because he is used to them. A man can stand anything
once he gets used to it because getting used to a thing commonly means
that the habitee has quit worrying about it. And yet since the dawn of
time when Adam poked fun at Eve's way of wearing her fig-leaf and on
down through the centuries until the present day and date it has ever
been the custom of men to gibe at the garments worn by women. Take our
humorous publications, which I scarcely need point out are edited by
men. Hardly could our comic weeklies manage to come out if the jokes
about the things which women wear were denied to them as
fountain-sources of inspiration. To the vaudeville monologist his jokes
about his wife and his mother-in-law and to the comic sketch artist his
pictures setting forth the torments of the stock husband trying to
button the stock gown of a stock wife up her stock back--these are
dependable and inevitable stand-bys.

Women do wear maniacal garments sometimes; that there is no denying. But
on the other hand styles for women change with such frequency that no
quirk of fashion however foolish and disfiguring ever endures for long
enough to work any permanent injury in the health of its temporarily
deluded devotees. Nothing I can think of gets old-fashioned with such
rapidity as a feminine fashion unless it is an egg.

If this season a woman's skirt is so scantily fashioned that as she
hobbles along she has the appearance of being leg-shackled, like the
lady called Salammbo, it is as sure as shooting that, come next season,
she will have leapt to the other extreme and her draperies will be more
than amply voluminous. If this winter her sleeves are like unto sausage
casings for tightness, be prepared when spring arrives to see her
wearing practically all the sleeves there are. About once in so often
she is found wearing a mode which combines beauty with saneness but that
often is not very often.

But even when they are at apogee of sartorial ridiculousness I maintain
that the garments of wo