"Well, I was over here in Paris when their great opening came off. But I heard about it. Nothing lacked. They all but served free champagne. But when I went back only a month later, the talk was already going around among folks on the ins, that there was something the matter with the Rellot collection. The women weren't just crazy about the hats and the modistes wouldn't look at them. Later on, what was left of them were sent down to South America--Colombia, I think. Women just hatching out from mantillas will stand for anything with a French label on it! And that summer Jimmy Hammond decided he'd go in for life-insurance." When he had talked as long as this I was usually the only person left listening, the rest having yawned, turned to each other, or melted away. But I listened, always, open-mouthed with astonishment and wonder. Before putting on my hats in those days I used to look at them hard, with respect, almost with alarm, feeling heavy on my head the weight of their unsuspected significance. Wondering what the great expert's opinion would be about the plain, everyday hats of ordinary women I asked him one day: "Tell me, can you descend to small beer? What do you think of the hats you see, not in those wonderful, silk-hung studios, but those you see on the heads of the women in the streets, on mine? Is this hat I have on stylish? I warn you I bought it off a counter for less than four dollars." He answered instantly, without giving a glance at my headgear: "You are a healthy, normal woman and you're wearing it. Of course it's in style. If it weren't, and you had to wear it, you'd be sick abed." "You exaggerate, you are always exaggerating," I protested. "You only know women who _care_ about the styles. I never bother my head about my hats! I just walk into almost any shop and buy the first hat that doesn't make me look too queer." "You don't have to bother yourself about it," he told me, his accent tinged with weary bitterness. "_We_ do the bothering! Months beforehand. An army of us, able-bodied men, smart women, pretty young girls, we all of us give up our lives to fixing things so you can walk into most any shop and pick up most any hat and find it doesn't make you look too 'queer,' which is your way of saying that it doesn't make you look out of style." "There are moments," I told him, in a half-serious indignation, "when I find you too absurd for words, the victim of the most absurd hallucinations! All this portentous talk about the world-wide conspiracy to make people keep up with the style. As if the style had any importance for sensible people!" "If you knew more about the capital and brains that are invested in that conspiracy, you'd take it seriously, all right," he assured me with melancholy, "and as for not taking the styles seriously, how many thousand dollars would it take to pay you to go around in the street one day, just one day, in the big bustle your mother used to be ashamed to go outdoors without?"