Now the adoption of a rigorous and monotonous utilitarianism in masculine attire has had two unlovely results.  In the first place, men, since they ceased to covet beautiful clothes for themselves, have wasted much valuable time in counselling and censuring women; and, in the second place, there has come, with the loss of their fine trappings, a corresponding loss of illusions on the part of the women who look at them.  Black broadcloth and derby hats are calculated to destroy the most robust illusions in Christendom; and men—­from motives hard to fathom—­have refused to retain in their wardrobes a single article which can amend an imperfect ideal.  This does not imply that women fail to value friends in black broadcloth, nor that they refuse their affections to lovers and husbands in derby hats.  Nature is not to be balked by such impediments.  But as long as men wore costumes which interpreted their strength, enhanced their persuasiveness, and concealed their shortcomings, women accepted their dominance without demur.  They made no idle claim to equality with creatures, not only bigger and stronger, not only more capable and more resolute, not only wiser and more experienced, but more noble and distinguished in appearance than they were themselves.  What if the assertive attitude of the modern woman, her easy arrogance, and the confidence she places in her own untried powers, may be accounted for by the dispiriting clothes which men have determined to wear, and the wearing of which may have cost them no small portion of their authority?

The whole attitude of women in this regard is fraught with significance.  Men have rashly discarded those details of costume which enhanced their comeliness and charm (we have but to look at Van Dyck’s portraits to see how much rare distinction is traceable to subdued elegance of dress); but women have never through the long centuries laid aside the pleasant duty of self-adornment.  They dare not if they would,—­too much is at stake; and they experience the just delight which comes from cooperation with a natural law.  The flexibility of their dress gives them every opportunity to modify, to enhance, to reveal, and to conceal.  It is in the highest degree interpretative, and through it they express their aspirations and ideals, their thirst for combat and their realization of defeat, their fluctuating sentiments and their permanent predispositions.

   “A winning wave, deserving note,
    In the tempestuous petticoat;
    A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
    I see a wild civility.”

Naturally, in a matter so vital, they are not disposed to listen to reason, and they cannot be argued out of a great fundamental instinct.  Women are constitutionally incapable of being influenced by argument,—­a limitation which is in the nature of a safeguard.  The cunning words in which M. Marcel Provost urges them to follow the example of men, sounds, to their ears, a little like the words in which the fox which