In such hands, even “featherses” become a fine art, not a matter of vanity.  Are women so much more vain than men?  No doubt they talk more about their dress, for there is much more to talk about; yet did you never hear the men of fashion discuss boots and hats and the liveries of grooms?  A good friend of mine, a shoemaker, who supplies very high heels for a great many pretty feet on Fifth Avenue in New York, declares that women are not so vain in that direction as men.  “A man who thinks he has a handsome foot,” quoth our fashionable Crispin, “is apt to give us more trouble than any lady among our customers.  I have noticed this for twenty years.”  The testimony is consoling—­to women.

And this naturally suggests the question, What is to be the future of masculine costume?  Is the present formlessness and gracelessness and monotony of hue to last forever, as suited to the rough needs of a workaday world?  It is to be remembered that the difference in this respect between the dress of the sexes is a very recent thing.  Till within a century or so, men dressed as picturesquely as women, and paid as minute attention to their costume.  Even the fashions in armor varied as extensively as the fashions in gowns.  One of Henry III.’s courtiers, Sir J. Arundel, had fifty-two complete suits of cloth of gold.  No satin, no velvet, was too elegant for those who sat to Copley for their pictures.  In Puritan days the laws could hardly be made severe enough to prevent men from wearing silver-lace and “broad bone-lace,” and shoulder-bands of undue width, and double ruffs and “immoderate great breeches.”  What seemed to the Cavaliers the extreme of stupid sobriety in dress would pass now for the most fantastic array.  Fancy Samuel Pepys going to a wedding of to-day in his “new colored silk suit and coat trimmed with gold buttons, and gold broad lace round his hands, very rich and fine.”  It would give to the ceremony the aspect of a fancy ball; yet how much prettier a sight is a fancy ball than the ordinary entertainment of the period!

At intervals the rigor of masculine costume is a little relaxed; velvets resume their picturesque sway:  and, instead of the customary suit of solemn black, gentlemen even appear in blue and gold editions at evening parties.  Let us hope that good sense and taste may yet meet each other, for both sexes; that men may borrow for their dress some womanly taste, women some masculine sense; and society may again witness a graceful and appropriate costume, without being too much absorbed in “featherses.”

VI

STUDY AND WORK