[Illustration] “Professor, if I did not know how fearfully and wonderfully it was made, and how unpromising for the purpose, I should say that you were talking through your hat.” The Professor rewarded me with her choicest twinkle. “Well,” she said, “I sha’n’t be able to laugh in my sleeve much longer; fashion is making it tighter every day!” “Can you not see,” I went on, “that the tightness or looseness of a sleeve, for example, must have some direct effect upon the mental attitude of a woman? Are not these constant changes destructive of intellectual repose and progress? If dress is a language, how can you escape a resulting confusion in this instability?” “My dear sir, that constant change of which you speak is not an instability, but a consistent and symmetrical ebb and flow.” “It may be pure curiosity, Professor, but even if Rosalind did not have ‘a doublet and hose in her disposition,’ it seems to me that we well may wonder how far the current bloomer affects the mind of the current young woman. It cannot be possible that so momentous and revolutionary a condition as the bloomer shall be without effect upon the mind of woman--and not merely upon the women who wear them, but upon the whole sex. It has been said that not only the physical structure but the character of men have been modified by the fact that men persistently avoid bagging their trousers at the knees. Will not the divided skirt divide woman’s attention--” “As for bloomers,” said the Professor, “and all related forms of dual garmentature, I am going to lecture about them before the Zenith Club, and, if you are very good, when my paper is quite completed I shall read it to you. Meanwhile, I may remark that the bloomer is not ‘current’ at all, save, perhaps, in a modified and semi-visible way in partnership with an abbreviated skirt,--but this is anticipating.” [Illustration] [Illustration] VII CHANCE AND CHOICE [Illustration] A distinguished general and admirable gentleman once was said to have lost the Presidency because he called the tariff a “local issue.” It might be difficult for us to discipline Coleridge for calling love a “local anguish.” Yet the plausibility of the statement should not defend the culprit. Love is, actually, not at all local, particularly when it is an anguish. It is immensely pervasive, an international issue, an inter-planetary, a universal issue. The light of love may be hidden under the bushel of modesty, yet its undaunted X-rays will penetrate the farthermost spaces.