be over-dressed at all points and angles where she is not
under-dressed, and, mentally, let us place alongside her a man who by
the standards of his times and his contemporaries is conventionally
garbed. To find the woman we want, we probably must travel to New York
and seek her out in a smart restaurant at night. Occasionally she is
found elsewhere but it is only in New York, that city where so many of
the young women are prematurely old and so many of the old women are
prematurely young, that she abounds in sufficient profusion to become a
common type instead of an infrequent one. This woman is waging that
battle against the mounting birthdays which nobody ever yet won. Her
hair has been dyed in those rich autumnal tints which are so becoming to
a tree in its Indian summer, but so unbecoming to a woman in hers.
Richard K. Fox might have designed her jewelry; she glistens with
diamonds until she makes you think of the ice coming out of the Hudson
River in the early spring. But about her complexion there is no
suggestion of a March thaw. For it is a climate-proof shellac. Her
eyebrows are the self-made kind, and her lips were done by hand. Her
skirt is too short for looks and too tight for comfort; she is tightly
prisoned at the waistline and not sufficiently confined in the bust.
There is nothing natural or rational anywhere about her. She is as
artificial as a tin minnow and she glitters like one.

Next your attention is invited to the male of the species. He is assumed
to be dressed in accordance with the dictates of good taste and with due
regard for all the ordinary proprieties. But is he? Before deciding
whether he is or isn't, let us look him over, starting from the feet and
working upward. A matter of inches above his insteps brings us to the
bottom of his trouser-legs. Now these trouser-legs of his are morally
certain to be too long, in which event they billow down over his feet in
slovenly and ungraceful folds, or they are too short, in which event
there is an awkward, ugly cross-line just above his ankles. If he is a
thin man, his dress waistcoat bulges away from his breastbone so the
passerby can easily discover what brand of suspenders he fancies; but if
he be stoutish, the waistcoat has a little way of hitching along up his
mid-riff inch by inch until finally it has accordion-pleated itself in
overlapping folds thwartwise of his tummy, coyly exposing an inch or so
of clandestine shirt-front.

It requires