No woman could be more completely, undebatably sane than the Professor. I know what I am talking about. And yet the Professor wears a hat. I had occasion, one day, when she had left it for a moment on a table, to study it analytically as a creation. It was a fearful and wonderful thing. No man ever can forget the moment when first, with mature deliberation, and in a consciousness of the vast significance of life, he takes up a woman’s hat, timorously, as if it were a ten-inch shell or Minerva’s helmet, and gazes into its fragile fastness. When I mentally grasped, as a man may in the absence of the wearer, the many and extraordinary elements of the Professor’s hat; when I sought to associate its multi-colored grotesqueness with the classic simplicity of the Professor’s profile; when I figured its heterogeneous elements as an object of decoration for the Professor’s outward and visible effect; when I fancied the Professor’s brain flashing and glowing under this riotous symbolism, I was filled with a new sense of the futility of reason, a new awe for the wonder of woman. [Illustration] Dr. Holmes has spoken of the hat as “the vulnerable point of the artificial integument”; but plainly he was speaking of the masculine hat, for woman’s hat is no vulnerable point with her. It is her strong point, her point of vantage, the citadel of her sophistries. You can reason with her about other things, but you cannot reason with her about her hats; not, mind you, because she will not listen, but because she, or the hat, makes you not want to. This is not to say that it makes no difference who wears the hat. It does make a difference. Take a device like the calash, such as our great-grandmothers wore. There were faces that did not look well in it, faces which quite naturally might have made us think less well of the calash for the moment. Under certain other circumstances--that is to say, over a certain other head, its quaintness begins to have a meaning, and it seems as natural and acceptable as anything else which the right face and the right person choose to display for us. Thackeray contended that sauer-kraut tastes good in Germany, and it is notorious that the bagpipes sound quite reasonable in Scotland. In the same way, there is no form of hat yet devised by human ingenuity that will not tempt forgiveness when it is on the right woman.