As American women are so fond of copying English ways they should be willing to take a few lessons on the subject of raiment from across the water. As this is not intended to be a dissertation on "How to Dress Well on Nothing a Year," and as I feel the greatest diffidence in approaching a subject of which I know absolutely nothing, it will be better to sheer off from these reefs and quicksands. Every one who reads these lines will know perfectly well what is meant, when reference is made to the good sense and practical utility of English women's dress. What disgusts and angers me (when my way takes me into our surface or elevated cars or into ferry boats and local trains) is the utter dissonance between the outfit of most of the women I meet and their position and occupation. So universal is this, that it might almost be laid down as an axiom, that the American woman, no matter in what walk of life you observe her, or what the time or the place, is always persistently and grotesquely overdressed. From the women who frequent the hotels of our summer or winter resorts, down all the steps of the social staircase to the char-woman, who consents (spasmodically) to remove the dust and waste-papers from my office, there seems to be the same complete disregard of fitness. The other evening, in leaving my rooms, I brushed against a portly person in the half-light of the corridor. There was a shimmer of (what appeared to my inexperienced eyes as) costly stuffs, a huge hat crowned the shadow itself, "topped by nodding plumes," which seemed to account for the depleted condition of my feather duster. I found on inquiring of the janitor, that the dressy person I had met, was the char-woman in street attire, and that a closet was set aside in the building, for the special purpose of her morning and evening transformations, which she underwent in the belief that her social position in Avenue A would suffer, should she appear in the streets wearing anything less costly than seal-skin and velvet or such imitations of those expensive materials as her stipend would permit.