And woman herself quite clearly perceives the force of association, the importance, if the significance of the hat is to be preserved and understood, of keeping it on her head. If this were not so why should we be confronted with the monumental paradox that our womankind are keeping their hats on in church and taking them off in places of amusement? At the theatre woman consents to be separated from her hat, and to have her hat separated from her. At her devotions she is not yet willing to commit this discord, and in the dim religious light it twinkles and shimmers its owner’s insistent dictum: The hat is the woman. In a thousand ways the hat declares the existence of occult meanings. A woman who would cut a man who wore a made tie, who would not buy a reproduced antique or pirated print, who knows Sèvres at a hundred yards and a real Bokhara in the dark, will cover her head with linen lilies and cotton-bloated roses. A woman who would hesitate to put a jewel in her hair, will heap upon the dyed straw of her hat festoons of glass and steel and wax, with the fretted carcass of a bird. After all, there is no occasion to take hats seriously, unless you happen to sit behind one, which, of course, cannot always be happening. They are a wonderful study; there are so many different kinds; they have been talked about so much, and have filled so large a place in our lives, especially in public audiences. They have been discussed as widely and as fervidly as the Federal Constitution. Because of them, men have passed laws and sleepless nights. Because of them men fought duels in the last century and lawsuits in this. To make it possible to have them more refulgent and fetching, husbands and fathers have worked on Sundays and stopped smoking. Though it has been assailed with fanatical bitterness, buffeted by satire, stripped by statute, stoned by envy, disciplined by reform, the hat serenely survives, a defiant catalogue of every trait for which it ever has been either praised or condemned. From out the din of conflict and discussion it rises unscathed and unashamed the proud emblem of woman’s pictorial supremacy, which all nature has said must and shall be preserved. And you know what she can do with a veil; she can make you forget that a veil is barbarous; she can make you forget that you shouldn’t like veils,--she can make you like her in one. She can make it increase her effect of preciousness, if that effect is in her line; or make it increase her sphinx-like effect, if that happens to be in her line. She no longer is extravagant in contriving them. Sarah’s was to cost a thousand pieces of silver. She now is content to make it a direct and specific instrument of illusion. [Illustration]