The first number of the _Woman’s Supplement_, which has prompted these reflections, suggests another: the perpetual wonder and delight of men at the success with which women accommodate facts to their ideals. We saw them, just now, doing this with their literature; we saw them determined that, at all costs, this shall be pleasing and themselves the most pleasing things in it; we saw the notable success of George Sand in accommodating her historical to her ideal self. But they are as successful with nature as with history. Just now, for example, sloping shoulders are manifestly the ideal—sloping shoulders with the obviously appropriate balloon sleeves, as in Mr. Bernard Lintott’s lady, or else with no sleeves at all, as in M. Jean Doumergue’s. And part of the same ideal is that the “figure” shall be anything but “full.” Now are women’s shoulders naturally more sloping or their figures less full than they used to be? These are puzzling questions, but not beyond conjecture, and, for my part, I guess that the answer is No. Yet our women have easily triumphed over nature and slope their shoulders with the uniformity of a regiment sloping arms, while every woman with a full figure has quietly become a _fausse maigre_. While I am about it, let me echo the usual male protest. As the _Supplement_ shows, women have not yet persuaded themselves to abandon their detestable high heels. The consequence is that there threatens to be no longer any such thing as a graceful gait. _Incessu patuit dea_ will soon have become an incomprehensible allusion. And that hideous square patch which too often peeps above the back of the shoe? I suppose it is just a practical device to strengthen the stocking in a part of stress; but I hardly think really “nice” women can abide it. On the whole, however, I subscribe cheerfully to the current opinion that woman’s dress was never so charming as it is at present. That is probably an illusion. The mysterious laws that regulate fashion mercifully regulate also the capacity for enjoying it. And it is a mercy, too, that the beauty of woman can triumph even over “old-fashioned” things. To our modern eyes the fashions of the ’70’s and ’80’s were far from beautiful in themselves—bunchy, humpy, without “line.” Yet, when they were playing _Peter Ibbetson_, one saw some fair women in them—and was at once reconciled, able in fact to see them with the eye of their period. PRACTICAL LITERATURE