Now a word with you, you dear, unsophisticated man.  I have heard you, with the sound of your hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month salary ringing in your ears, gurgle and splash about a girl who wears “simple white muslins” to balls; and I have heard you set down, as extravagant, and too rich for your purse, the girl who wears silk.  There is no more extravagant or troublesome gown in the world than what you call a “simple white muslin.”  In the first place, it never is muslin, unless it is Paris muslin, which is no joke, if you are thinking of paying for it yourself, as it necessitates a silk lining, which costs more than the outside.  If it is trimmed with lace, that would take as much of your salary as the coal for all winter would come to.  If trimmed with ribbons, they must be changed often to freshen the gown, whose only beauty is its freshness.  Deliver me from a soiled or stringy white party-dress!  If it can be worn five times during the winter, the girl is either a careful dancer or else a wallflower.  In either case, after every wearing she must have it pressed out and put away as daintily as if it were egg-shells, all of which is the greatest nuisance on earth.  Often such a gown is torn all to pieces the first time it is worn.  Scores of “simple white muslin” ball-gowns at a hundred dollars apiece are only worn once or twice.

Now take the “extravagant” girl with her flowered taffeta silk, or plain satin, or brocade dress.  There is at once the effect of richness and elegance.  No matter how sweet and pretty she is, you at once decide that you never could afford to dress her.  But that taffeta cost, perhaps, only a dollar a yard.  The satin, possibly a dollar and a half.  They require almost no trimming, because the material is so handsome and the effect must be as simple as possible.  Such a gown never need be lined with silk unless you wish to do it.  Many a girl gets up such a gown for fifty or sixty dollars.  And then think of the service that there is in it.  It does not tear, it does not crush.  When she comes home she looks as fresh as when she started.  When it soils at the edge of the skirt, she has it cleaned, and there she is with a new dress again.  Do you call that extravagant?  Why, my dear sirs, it is only the very rich who can afford to wear “simple white muslins!”

There is a hollowness about having a man praise your gowns when you know he doesn’t know what he is talking about.  When a man praises your clothes he always is praising you in them.  You never will hear a man praise even the good dressing of a woman he dislikes; while girls who positively hate another girl often will add, “But she certainly does know how to dress.”