I have seen nothing more wonderful this season than the combinations of colour in dress. To hear the suggestions of your dressmaker on the subject is to hear all your preconceived notions disputed and set at naught. The other day I went with a friend to order a dress, and she selected one of the new canvas grenadines, blue with a white silk spot. The blue was rather a bright one, and the material very transparent, and open in its meshes. There were several suggestions made for the silken lining by the very clever woman who was attending to us—white, pale blue, a darker blue, emerald green, pink, rose, red, lemon, orange, and, finally, a mauve—and mauve it was—being the latest colour combination and newer than the rest. But violet or heliotrope goes best, to my mind, with crimson; and that is a colour combination which came in as long ago as the early seventies, after the Franco-Prussian war; and nothing can exceed its effectiveness if you get the right shades for your mixture. Then heliotrope and light blue is very pretty; but much less so than the other. The favourite mixture of this season is, without doubt, black and white, and a very useful one it is. One of the favourite materials for the everyday wear of the season is alpaca, and next to that, for best gowns, comes canvas grenadines, and a new make of crepon. Nothing can exceed the beauty of the satin-faced foulards, which everyone seems to be ordering; and there is a great return to spots, either placed at regular distances over the material, or else arranged in irregularly-shaped masses. The new nun’s veilings are also very pretty, and make delightful summer frocks for girls. [Illustration: SOME SUMMER GOWNS.] There is much to be said on the subject of linings, and on all sides you will probably hear it said that no silk, or, at least, no rustling silk linings are used now; and that all dresses are so soft and clinging that only very soft linings are used, such as _batiste_, which is either watered or plain, muslin, or any kind of unstiffened material. Alpaca is lined with the same material, and not with silk, but canvas must be silk-lined, so a new kind of foulard silk is to be found which is non-rustling and flows in straight lines in the skirt. Instead of a braid at the edge of your skirt, you must now use velvet, which is to be obtained at all the shops for that purpose, and black velvet is most used for the purpose. The attenuation of the quite up-to-date woman is very remarkable, and her skirts are so long and so unstiffened that they wrap round her feet, and make her look “like a mermaid,” as one of our many fashion-writers assures us; but, whatever the creature is that she may be like, the effect is startling; it is so long and so unshapely when the new style is applied to a thin figure. [Illustration: TWO HARMONIES IN BLACK AND WHITE.]