Some women are as long in dressing as Caesar was in marshalling his army. They go to church to show their clothes, spend more money for hacks than for Bibles, strut home like peacocks, forgetting that clothes are but the reminders of lost innocency and that to be proud of rustling silk is to be like the madman who laughs at the rattling of his fetters. They only think of dress, and were you to steal their clothes you would rob them of the only valuable thing they possessed. Skirts have been bloated like a balloon and long as a crocodile’s tail, but now they are meagre as a mummy and docked like a horse’s tail, for Fashion is a foolish and freakish goddess. A short skirt is said to be economical in material, sanitary because it is not a street or sidewalk cleaner, and comfortable for locomotion—but when art sacrifices utility in attempt to show the figure, as Venus before Anchises or Medea before Jason, it is a matter not only of comment but censure. Too often on leading thoroughfares we fine a godless model of fashion which is an insult to sex and an outrage on decency. * * * * * The first short skirt was made in the Garden of Eden of fig leaves because there were no Parisian dressmakers present. Skirt styles today are going back to the original fig-leaf fashion. Mother Eve ate the apple, became “wise” and her first thought was of dress, and that is all some of her daughters have thought of since. American women are willing to wear any skirt that bears a Paris label, but would they if they knew it was a French fashion to advertise demimondaine charms? If good women, who wear the suggestive short, close-fitting and diaphanous skirt, knew what bad men said when they went by, they would fall dead or call for a taxi and break the speed limit to get home and hide in the cellar. Men are a bad lot and women should help them to be better and not worse. There are men in hospitals and hell who owe their damnation in time and eternity to the skirts of some bad, beautiful woman. Fashion is the world’s undertaker and often charges a woman a big bill for a body with diseased functions, a mind with dwarfed faculties, and a soul with a future damned. Girls, whose altar is a looking-glass, and their Bible a fashion magazine, might well pause to ask themselves how they will look in their coffin-shroud when the prevaricating preacher tries to offer some word of comfort to the mourners, and what they will say to the great Judge when they stand “naked and ashamed,” because on earth they wore the skirts of sin instead of the robe of Christ’s righteousness. * * * * *