The twin idols that accept with all the complacency of an ancient Buddha the devotion of more worshipers than any church or creed can claim are Fashion and Pleasure.  Not sane fashion which helps make men and women attractive and clothes them with neatness and care, protects them by courtesies, and shields them by conventionalities, but mad fashion.  Not real pleasure that fills eye with delight and days with happiness that will be remembered even when one is old and days are dark and hard but mad pleasure, the thief and robber.

What costly sacrifices are offered every hour of the day and night to the twin idols.  When men and women away back in the dim past laid their children in the hands of Baal they made their weird music, sang their wild songs and shouted aloud that they might drown the appeal of the sacrifice.  The dark ages have passed.  It is the enlightened age—­and yet with music and shoutings, weird dancings and songs men and women today drown the appeal of the costly sacrifice laid on the altar before Fashion and Pleasure.

[Illustration:  SHE WORSHIPS PLEASURE AND FASHION]

There in her room sits Ellen Gregg, that is she used to be Ellen, she is now deeply offended if friends forget to call her Eleanor.  She is an ardent worshiper of the Idols.  When she was twelve and fourteen she was a frank, contented, happy girl, simple in her tastes and able to have a good time in most inexpensive ways.  A trolley ride to a park and supper under the trees she looked forward to for days and enjoyed in retrospect, until a trip to the lake, a concert, a visit to the picture galleries, or a shopping tour down town where she spent the twenty-five cents she had earned and saved, gave her another happy day to remember.  Eleanor is now eighteen and she has been at work for two years.  She needs plain becoming dresses, plenty of shirt waists, sensible, pretty shoes, rubbers, a rain-coat, a suit, two becoming hats, for it is the beginning of winter.  But she has none of these things.  She has just been kneeling before the altar and has laid her costly sacrifice of common sense and comfort, perhaps of health, there in the presence of Fashion and Pleasure.  Her face is troubled as she sits there in her room for the memory of her mother’s reproof and her brother’s disapproval stings a little.  But in a moment she looks toward the bed.  Lying upon it, smoothed out carefully, is the result of the sacrifice—­a thin silk gown of palest blue draped with a fragile chiffon, trimmed and caught up with crystal drops and tiny rosebuds.  It is a pretty thing.  Besides it is a spotless white outing coat, rough, and to quote the words of the clerk who helped her select it, “exceedingly modish.”  There are pale blue stockings and pumps.  She did hesitate about the pumps but they were there.  The hat was there too.  She hoped to go perhaps to two dances, she knew she should go to the theater, for she already had an invitation and there might be another.