Yes, girls really believe, I suppose, that they dress for other girls.  But they do not.  They dress for men.  And only experience will teach them the highest wisdom in the matter.  But that they cannot acquire until they believe that only another woman will know just how well they are dressed, and, above all, whether Doucet turned them out, or a dress-maker in the house at two dollars a day.

Men only take in the effect.  Women know how the effect is produced.  Of course, now I am speaking of the general run of men and women:  neither the man who clerked at Cash & Silk’s nor the one who pays his wife’s bills in Paris, but the man in his native state of charming ignorance of materials; the man who always suggests a “gusset” as a remedy for too scant a gown, who calls insertion “tatting,” and who, in setting out for the opera, will tell his wife to put on her “bonnet and shawl,” although she may have on point-lace and diamonds.  In his more modern aspect he tells you that a girl at the Junior Promenade had on a blue dress with feathers around her neck—­which you must translate into meaning anything from blue satin to organdie, and that between dances she wore a feather boa.

It is the effect only that men take in; and when a man goes into ecstasies over a gown of pale green on a hot day just because you look so cool and fresh in it, when you know that you paid but forty cents a yard for it, and only nods when you show him your velvet and ermine wrap, which cost you two hundred dollars, I would just like to ask you if it pays to dress for him.  Women know this from a sorrowful experience.  Girls have to learn it for themselves.  A ball-dress of white tarlatan, made up over white paper cambric, with a white sash, will satisfy a man quite as well as a Paris muslin trimmed with a hundred dollars’ worth of Valenciennes lace and made up over silk.  Most of them would never know the difference.

I do not know whether to be sorry for these men or not.  It must be lovely not to agonize and plan and worry to have everything the best of its kind.  I would like to take in only the effect, and never know why I was pleased.  Too much analysis is death to unmitigated rapture.  You always are haunted by knowing exactly what is lacking, and just how it could be remedied.  But these dear men are singularly deluded in many ways, and upon these delusions clever women play, as a master plays upon an organ.  And young girls, who have not had time to study into the philosophy of it—­how should the poor things know that clothes have any philosophy?—­as usual, have to suffer for it.

One of these delusions is the “simple white muslin” delusion.  When a man speaks of a “simple white muslin” in the softly admiring tone which he generally adopts to go with it, he means anything on earth in the line of a thin, light stuff which produces in his mind the effect of youth and innocence.  A ball-dress or a cotton morning-gown is to him a “simple white muslin.”