I ask if girls could ever get into that state in the natural course of
things! It is the result of vile habits. They cease to care for things
which they ought to like to do, and they devote themselves to what ought
to be only an incident. People dress in their best without break. They go
to the springs before breakfast in shining raiment, and they go into the
parlor after supper in shining raiment, and it is shine, shine, shine, all
the way between, and a different shine each time. You may well suppose
that I was like an owl among birds of Paradise, for what little finery I
had was in my (eminently) travelling-trunk: yet, though it was but a dory,
compared with the Noah's arks that drove up every day, I felt, that, if I
could only once get inside of it, I could make things fly to some purpose.
Like poor Rabette, I would show the city that the country too could wear
clothes! I never walked down Broadway without seeing a dozen white trunks,
and every white trunk that I saw I was fully convinced was mine, if I
could only get at it. By-and-by mine came, and I blossomed. I arrayed
myself for morning, noon, and night, and everything else that came up, and
was, as the poet says,--

"Prodigious in change,
And endless in range,"--

for I would have scorned not to be as good as the best. The result was,
that in three days I touched bottom. But then we went away, and my
reputation was saved. I don't believe anybody ever did a larger business
on a smaller capital; but I put a bold face on it. I cherish the hope that
nobody suspected I could not go on in that ruinous way all summer,--I, who
in three days had mustered into service every dress and sash and ribbon
and rag that I had had in three years or expected to have in three more.
But I never will, if I can help it, hold my head down where other people
are holding their heads up.

I would not be understood as decrying or depreciating dress. It is a duty
as well as a delight. Mrs. Madison is reported to have said that she would
never forgive a young lady who did not dress to please, or one who seemed
pleased with her dress. And not only young ladies, but old ladies, and old
gentlemen, and everybody, ought to make their dress a concord and not a
discord. But Saratoga is pitched on a perpetual falsetto, and stuns you.
One becomes sated with an interminable _piece de resistance_ of full
dress. At the sea-side you bathe; at the mountains you put on stout boots
and coarse fro