“And then,” said my wife, “every device of the toilet is immediately taken up and varied and improved on, so as to impose an almost monthly necessity for novelty.  The jackets of May are outshone by the jackets of June; the buttons of June are antiquated in July; the trimmings of July are passees by September; side-combs, back-combs, puffs, rats, and all sorts of such matters, are in a distracted race of improvement; every article of feminine toilet is on the move towards perfection.  It seems to me that an infinity of money must be spent in these trifles, by those who make the least pretension to keep in the fashion.”

“Well, papa,” said Jennie, “after all, it’s just the way things always have been since the world began.  You know the Bible says, ’Can a maid forget her ornaments?’ It’s clear she can’t.  You see, it’s a law of Nature; and you remember all that long chapter in the Bible that we had read in church last Sunday, about the curls and veils and tinkling ornaments and crimping-pins, and all that.  Women always have been too much given to dress, and they always will be.”

“The thing is,” said Marianne, “how can any woman, I, for example, know what is too much or too little?  In mamma’s day, it seems, a girl could keep her place in society, by hard economy, and spend only fifty dollars a year on her dress.  Mamma found a hundred dollars ample.  I have more than that, and find myself quite straitened to keep myself looking well.  I don’t want to live for dress, to give all my time and thoughts to it; I don’t wish to be extravagant; and yet I wish to be lady-like; it annoys and makes me unhappy not to be fresh and neat and nice; shabbiness and seediness are my aversion.  I don’t see where the fault is.  Can one individual resist the whole current of society?  It certainly is not strictly necessary for us girls to have half the things we do.  We might, I suppose, live without many of them, and, as mamma says, look just as well, because girls did before these things were invented.  Now, I confess, I flatter myself, generally, that I am a pattern of good management and economy, because I get so much less than other girls I go with.  I wish you could see Miss Thorne’s fall dresses that she showed me last year when she was visiting here.  She had six gowns, and no one of them could have cost less than seventy or eighty dollars, and some of them must have been even more expensive; and yet I don’t doubt that this fall she will feel that she must have just as many more.  She runs through and wears out these expensive things, with all their velvet and thread lace, just as I wear my commonest ones; and at the end of the season they are really gone,—­spotted, stained, frayed, the lace all pulled to pieces,—­nothing left to save or make over.  I feel as if Jennie and I were patterns of economy, when I see such things.  I really don’t know what economy is.  What is it?”