“You have figured silk or cut velvet buttons, on your coat, I believe.  Let me see?  Yes.  Now, lasting buttons are more durable, and I remember very well when you wore them.  But they are out of fashion!  And here is your collar turned down over your black satin stock, (where, by the by, have all the white cravats gone, that were a few years ago so fashionable?) as smooth as a puritan’s!  Don’t you remember how much trouble you used to have, sometimes, to get your collar to stand up just so?  Ah, brother, you are an incorrigible follower of the fashions!”

“But, Mary, it is a great deal less trouble to turn the collar over the stock.”

“I know it is, now that it is fashionable to do so.”

“It is, though, in fact.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“But when it was fashionable to have the collar standing, you were very willing to take the trouble.”

“You would not have me affect singularity, sister?”

“Me?  No, indeed!  I would have you continue to follow the fashions as you are now doing.  I would have you dress like other people.  And there is one other thing that I would like to see in you.”

“What is that.”

“I would like to see you willing to allow me the same privilege.”

“You have managed your case so ingeniously, Mary,” her brother now said, “as to have beaten me in argument, though I am very sure that I am right, and you in error, in regard to the general principle.  I hold it to be morally wrong to follow the fashions.  They are unreasonable and arbitrary in their requirements, and it is a species of miserable folly, to be led about by them.  I have conversed a good deal with old aunt Abigail on the subject, and she perfectly agrees with me.  Her opinions, you can not, of course, treat with indifference?”

“No, not my aunt’s.  But for all that, I do not think that either she or uncle Absalom is perfectly orthodox on all matters.”

“I think that they can both prove to you beyond a doubt that it is a most egregious folly to be ever changing with the fashions.”

“And I think that I can prove to them that they are not at all uninfluenced by the fickle goddess.”

“Do so, and I will give up the point.  Do so and I will avow myself an advocate of fashion.”

“As you are now in fact.  But I accept your challenge, even though the odds of age and numbers are against me.  I am very much mistaken, indeed, if I cannot maintain my side of the argument, at least to my own satisfaction.”

“You may do that probably; but certainly not to ours.”

“We will see,” was the laughing reply.