A party went to the opera and occupied a box. One of the men saw a raveling on the shoulder of one of the ladies. He picked it, and it kept on coming. He pulled and pulled till he had a tremendous mass, which he threw behind the door. Some days after the men met and talked it over. One of them said: “My wife had a good time, but she cannot figure out how she lost her union suit.” _Highty-tighty Aphrodite_ At present, partly owing to what is very modestly called “barefoot” dancing, a severe season of clothelessness prevails; and the aforementioned exercises afford the public quite a fair idea of “the most admirable spectacle in nature”--that is to say, bowlegs, knock-knees, thick ankles, spray feet, shoulders scraggy or pudgy, knees bony or lumpy, and weirdly shaped legs. The modernist poets also have been seized by the mania for nudity--but let us hope that with them it is rather theory than practice; for the average literator is not usually “a dream of form in days of thought.” One mocking rhymester thus makes game of such poetic aspirations: All the poets have been stripping, Quaintly into moonbeams slipping, Running out like wild Bacchantes, Minus lingerie and panties. Never knew of such a frantic Belvederean, corybantic, Highty-tighty Aphrodite, Stepping out without a nightie. One of these modernist bards puts her own fancies into the brain of an old-time lady, stiff in pink and silver brocade, as she walks in a prim garden awaiting the coming of her suitor. She would like to leave “all that pink and silver crumpled on the ground”; for, Underneath my stiffened gown Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin. Thus divested of raiment, “I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,” and her lover, seeing her, would pursue “till he caught me in the shade.” A writer of free verse is more candid; it is herself she would disrobe. “Since the earliest days I have dressed myself in fanciful clothes,” she says, trying to express herself in this manner; but now she is weary of putting “romance and fantasy into my raiment.” She realizes that “my clothes are not me, myself”; hence the stern resolve: I think I shall go naked into the streets, And wander unclothed into people’s parlors. The incredulous eyes of the bewildered world Might give me back my true image ... Maybe in the glances of others I would find out what I really am.