“But, mamma, you know our allowance isn’t anything like that,—it is quite a slender one, though not so small as yours was,” said Marianne. “Don’t you think the customs of society make a difference? Do you think, as things are, we could go back and dress for the sum you did?” “You cannot,” said my wife, “without a greater sacrifice of feeling than I wish to impose on you. Still, though I don’t see how to help it, I cannot but think that the requirements of fashion are becoming needlessly extravagant, particularly in regard to the dress of women. It seems to me, it is making the support of families so burdensome that young men are discouraged from marriage. A young man, in a moderately good business, might cheerfully undertake the world with a wife who could make herself pretty and attractive for seventy-five dollars a year, when he might sigh in vain for one who positively could not get through, and be decent, on four hundred. Women, too, are getting to be so attached to the trappings and accessories of life, that they cannot think of marriage without an amount of fortune which few young men possess.” “You are talking in very low numbers about the dress of women,” said Miss Featherstone. “I do assure you that it is the easiest thing in the world for a girl to make away with a thousand dollars a year, and not have so much to show for it either as Marianne and Jenny.” “To be sure,” said I. “Only establish certain formulas of expectation, and it is the easiest thing in the world. For instance, in your mother’s day girls talked of a pair of gloves,—now they talk of a pack; then it was a bonnet summer and winter,—now it is a bonnet spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and hats like monthly roses,—a new blossom every few weeks.” “And then,” said my wife, “every device of the toilet is immediately taken up and varied and improved on, so as to impose an almost monthly necessity for novelty. The jackets of May are outshone by the jackets of June; the buttons of June are antiquated in July; the trimmings of July are _passées_ by September; side-combs, back-combs, puffs, rats, and all sorts of such matters, are in a distracted race of improvement; every article of feminine toilet is on the move towards perfection. It seems to me that an infinity of money must be spent in these trifles, by those who make the least pretension to keep in the fashion.” “Well, papa,” said Jenny, “after all, it’s just the way things always have been since the world began. You know the Bible says, ‘Can a maid forget her ornaments?’ It’s clear she can’t. You see, it’s a law of Nature; and you remember all that long chapter in the Bible that we had read in church last Sunday, about the curls and veils and tinkling ornaments and crimping-pins, and all that of those wicked daughters of Zion in old times. Women always have been too much given to dress, and they always will be.”