She is one of the busiest women in town. And the main part of her business is one which engages New York women, and men, too, ever more and more--the fight for prolonging youth. You would never suspect that she is the mother of a son twenty-five years old. Indeed, you would not suspect from her looks or her conversation that she is a mother. She is making her fight for youth most successfully. Of course, she uses no artifices--the New York women who care greatly about looks have long since abandoned artificiality, except as a fad. Her hair is thick and dark and fine. It is her own, kept vigorous by constant treatment. Her skin is clear and smooth and healthily pale--it costs her and her beauty assistants hours of labor to keep it thus. Her figure is tall and slender and girlish--her masseuse could tell you how that is done. She lives, eats, exercises, with the greatest regularity. And she eats little and drinks less. On dress she spends about fifty-five thousand dollars a year. You will not see her many times in the same hat or dress; and she has a passion for real lace underclothing and for those stockings which seem to have been woven on fairy looms of some substance so unsubstantial that only fairies could handle it. She bought twelve thousand dollars’ worth of underclothing when she was in Paris last spring. Her bills at the dressmaker’s of the Rue de la Paix were twenty-seven thousand dollars, and at the milliner’s twenty-four hundred dollars. She has about five thousand dollars invested in parasols. She has sixty-seven thousand dollars’ worth of wraps--sables, chinchillas and ermine cannot be got for small sums. She has many evening dresses that cost from eight hundred dollars to twelve hundred dollars each. She has few dresses that cost as little as one hundred and twenty-five dollars. The average price for her hats would be, perhaps, fifty dollars. She had one with fur on it last winter that cost two hundred and seventy-five dollars. The chief reason for her large expenditure for clothes is that now-a-days every detail of each costume must be in harmony. She must have slippers, stockings, skirt, dress, hat, parasol, all to match or in perfect harmony. For she is one of half a dozen New York women who are famous for style, and having established this reputation she must live up to it. When she ceases to fight for youth--which will be in about ten years--she will probably cut her expenditures for dress in half. By that time extravagance will have so far advanced that her successor will spend seventy-five thousand dollars or more on dress. The last season has seen a three-league advance. It is now the fashion to wear for a drive down the Avenue those delicate shades which are ruined so quickly. Next season the color scheme of the Avenue will be still more gorgeous and varied--and prodigiously more expensive.