The wide contrast, and one growing continually wider, in the characteristics of masculine and feminine dress, on those occasions when it most definitely expresses itself as dress, might suggest that some variation in the governing philosophy of each had taken place, perhaps at some definite time; for there was no such contrast in an earlier day. It may be that at the time--and we may set this early in the present century, easily within the period of our own national history--when man began to simplify his attire, to put aside all but the rudest decorative elements, woman definitely formulated her justifications for perpetuating the idea of clothes for clothes’ sake. We are bound to remember what she has had to live down. She has had to live down Queen Elizabeth, and all the hyperbole of Continental fashion when Continental fashion was in its most imaginative mood. Political traditions were not the only burdens of our ambitious young republic. Think of the gorgeous head-dresses, half as tall as the women who wore them, and which afforded such delight to the caricaturist! Have you ever stopped to think how few opportunities woman gives the cartoonist nowadays, how severe a strain she places upon his ingenuity? There may be an occasional note of excess. A recent foreign investigator found the clothes of our women too much so, too perfect for repose. This note of excess is the characteristic of genius. I myself have seen American women who, to a merely masculine prejudice, seem to be wearing too many rings. But we must make reasonable allowance for the natural accumulations of time. It has occurred to me that I might do as we may with a tree,--tell a woman’s age by her rings. [Illustration]