or a mackintosh.  If you were really dressing to kill (as a man) it might take half an hour; if merely to go about your business and not be specially remarked for foppishness, twenty minutes.  To divest yourself of all this and get into paijamas and so to bed:  ten minutes.  But when Vivie returned to herself and went about the world of 1909-1910, and merely wished to pass as an inconspicuous, modest woman she had to spend hours in dressing and undressing, and this is what she had to wear and waste so much of her time in adjusting and removing:—­

Next the skin, merino combinations, unwieldy garments requiring a contortionist’s education to put on without entangling your front and hind limbs.  The “combies” were specially buttoned with an infinitude of small, scarcely visible buttons, which always wanted sewing on and replacing, and were peevish about remaining in the button hole.  Often, too, the “combies” (I really can’t keep writing the full name) had to be tied here and there with little white ribbons which preferred getting into a knot (no wonder the average woman has a temper!).  When the “combies” went to the wash, all these ribbonlets had to be taken out, specially washed, specially ironed, and ingeniously threaded back into position.

Next to the combinations, proceeding outwards, came the corset, a most serious affair.  This exceedingly expensive instrument of torture was compounded chiefly of silk (which easily frayed) and whale-bone.  Many good women of the middle class have gone to their graves for three hundred years believing that Almighty God had specially created toothless whales of the Family Balaenidae solely for the purpose of providing women with the only possible ingredient for a corset; and for three hundred years, brave seamen of the Dutch, British and Basque nations had gone to a watery grave to procure for women this indispensable aid to correct clothing.  But these filaments of horny palatal processes are unamiable.  Though sheathed in silk or cotton, they, after the violent movements of a Suffragette or a charwoman, break through the restraining sheath and run into the body under the fifth rib, or press forward on to the thigh.  Which is why you often see a woman’s face in an omnibus express severe pain and her lips utter the exclamation “Aie, Aie.”  Then this confounded corset had to be laced with pink ribbons at the back and in front and both lacings demanded unusual suppleness of arms and sense of touch in finger-tips; and when the corset went to the wash the ribbons had to be drawn out, washed, ironed, and threaded again.

From the front of the corset hung two elastic suspenders as yet awaiting their prey.  But first must be drawn on the silk or stockinette knickerbockers which in the 1910 woman replaced the piteously laughable drawers of the Victorian period.  Then the suspenders clutched the rims of the stockings with an arrangement of nickel and rubber which no man would have tolerated for its inefficiency but would have thrown back in the face of the shopman and have been charged with assault.  In times of stress, at public meetings the suspenders would release the stockings from their hold, and the latter roll about the ankles of the embarrassed pleader for Woman’s Rights ("Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow,” and first of all throttle the modiste, thought Vivie).