The Englishwoman's love of petty display and cheap fripperies, her desire to outshine the neighbours and to put all she has on her back, and to pass everywhere for a woman of means and station, no doubt had its beginning in a laudable anxiety to make the best of things. Unfortunately, however, the tendency has been developed out of reason, to the neglect of the qualities which make a woman the inspiration and strength of a man's life. To dress, and to talking and thinking about it, the Englishwoman devotes unconscionable hours. The bare business of robing and disrobing takes up pretty well half her waking day. Her transference from the bath to the breakfast-table cannot be accomplished under fifty minutes. Before she will appear in the open she will make yet another toilet. She is a full twenty minutes tidying herself before lunch. In the afternoon there is an hour of getting into tea-gowns; and, crowning rite of all, my lady "strips" for dinner. From morn to dewy eve her little mind is busy with dress. The shopping, over which she makes such a fuss, is almost invariably a matter of new frocks, new hats, new shoes, new feathers, matching this, exchanging that, sitting on high stools before pomatumed counter-skippers, and dissipating, in the purchase of sheer superfluities, gold that men have toiled for. Her visiting is equally an unmitigatedly dressy matter; she goes to see her friends' frocks, not her friends, and it is the delight of her soul to turn up in toilettes which render her friends frankly and miserably envious. Of the real purport of clothes she knows nothing; and if you endeavour to explain it to her, she will charge you with the wish to make an old frump of her before her time. As for the expense of it all, she never bothers her pretty head about money matters; she tells you in the most childlike way that her account at the bank seems to be perpetually overdrawn, but that "Randall is a dear, kind boy, though he does swear a bit when some of the bills come in. Besides," she says, "I am sure it helps him in his profession to have a well-dressed wife."