To dress well is a social duty. Every educated self-respecting woman is bound to clothe her person as neatly, as tastefully and becomingly as she can. But just as a virtue when carried to excess develops into a vice, so the art of dressing well, when allowed to overstep its legitimate uses and expenditure, easily runs into folly and madness. The reckless extravagance of women’s dress at the present day is little short of criminal insanity. A feverish desire to outvie one another in the manner and make of their garments appears to possess every feminine creature whose lot in life places her outside positive penury. The inordinately wealthy, the normally rich, the well-to-do middle class and the shabby genteel are all equally infected by the same hysterical frenzy. And it is a frenzy which is humoured and encouraged on all sides by those who should have the sense, the intelligence and the foresight to realize the danger of such a tendency, and the misery to which in many cases it is surely bound to lead. Latterly there have been certain growlings and mutterings of discontent from husbands who have had to pay certain unexpectedly long bills for their wives’ “creations in costume”--but, as a matter of fact, it is really the men who are chiefly to blame for the wicked waste of money they afterwards resent and deplore. They are the principal instigators of the mischief,--the aiders and abettors of the destruction of their own credit and good name. For they openly show their admiration for women’s clothes more than for the women clothed,--that is to say, they are more easily captured by art than by nature. No group of male flatterers is ever seen round a woman whose dress is un-stylish or otherwise “out-of-date.” She may have the sweetest face in the world, the purest nature and the truest heart, but the “dressed” woman, the dyed, the artistically “faked” woman will nearly always score a triumph over her so far as masculine appreciation and attention are concerned.