Again, it surely does not behove the New Woman to throng the streets in front of the establishments of Mr. Peter Robinson or Madame Louise, in admiring ecstasies over novel cuts and colours, bows and bonnets, and all the feminine accoutrements of fashion. Conceive of men crowding the tailors’ and the haberdashers’ in like manner, and taking equal delight in ‘shopping!’ This last occupation, or rather pastime, of women is a certain sign of mental inferiority. A woman will spend a whole day ‘shopping’--that is to say, in the inspection of goods she does not want and has no intention of buying--and will return home when day is done and count her time well and profitably spent. ‘Shopping,’ as apart from any idea of purchasing, is a recognised form of feminine recreation, as tradesfolk know to their cost. Happy the shopkeeper whose trade does not lend itself to ‘shopping,’ but wretched is he where the vice is rampant. For woman is pitiless and exacting, impervious either to criticism, sarcasm, irony, or innuendo, on occasion; and the more logical the man with whom she contends, so much the more baffling is she to him. So, short of plain and possibly offensive speech (for none so readily or more causelessly offended than your ‘shopper’), the unhappy victims of this mania have no redress, but must continue to heap their counters with bales of cloth and rolls of silk for due examination, and must exhibit a Christian patience and forbearance when the ‘shopper’ departs without purchasing or apologising. No mere man could do this, for such assurance could only proceed from the opposite sex. A perusal of the advertisement sheets which form the bulk of women’s newspapers and magazines makes for disillusionment and depression; and you would need but little excuse if, after a course of these appeals to feminine love of adornment, you rose from it with a settled conviction that Woman is a Work of Art, padded here, pinched in there, painted, dyed, and carefully made up in every particular. He was, indeed, a philosopher worthy the name (or perhaps it was a more than usually candid woman!) who said that none of the consolations of religion or any pious ecstasies could equal the profound and solemn joy which accompanies a woman’s conviction of her being well dressed and the envy of her fellows.