Complete Essays | Page 6

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improving conversation, to the reading of bound books that cost at least
a dollar and a half (fifteen cents of which she gladly contributed to the
author), and she had a distaste for the gay society which was mainly a
flutter of ribbons and talk and pretty faces; and when she meditated, as
she did in her spare moments, her heart was sore over the frivolity of
life and the emptiness of fashion. She longed to make the world better,
and without any priggishness she set it an example of simplicity and
sobriety, of cheerful acquiescence in plainness and inconspicuousness.
One day--it was in the autumn--this lady had occasion to buy a new hat.
From a great number offered to her she selected a red one with a dull
red plume. It did not agree with the rest of her apparel; it did not fit her
apparent character. What impulse led to this selection she could not
explain. She was not tired of being good, but something in the
jauntiness of the hat and the color pleased her. If it were a temptation,
she did not intend to yield to it, but she thought she would take the hat
home and try it. Perhaps her nature felt the need of a little warmth. The
hat pleased her still more when she got it home and put it on and
surveyed herself in the mirror. Indeed, there was a new expression in
her face that corresponded to the hat. She put it off and looked at it.
There was something almost humanly winning and temptatious in it. In
short, she kept it, and when she wore it abroad she was not conscious of
its incongruity to herself or to her dress, but of the incongruity of the
rest of her apparel to the hat, which seemed to have a sort of
intelligence of its own, at least a power of changing and conforming
things to itself. By degrees one article after another in the lady's
wardrobe was laid aside, and another substituted for it that answered to
the demanding spirit of the hat. In a little while this plain lady was not
plain any more, but most gorgeously dressed, and possessed with the
desire to be in the height of the fashion. It came to this, that she had a

tea-gown made out of a window-curtain with a flamboyant pattern.
Solomon in all his glory would have been ashamed of himself in her
presence.
But this was not all. Her disposition, her ideas, her whole life, was
changed. She did not any more think of going about doing good, but of
amusing herself. She read nothing but stories in paper covers. In place
of being sedate and sober-minded, she was frivolous to excess; she
spent most of her time with women who liked to "frivol." She kept Lent
in the most expensive way, so as to make the impression upon
everybody that she was better than the extremest kind of Lent. From
liking the sedatest company she passed to liking the gayest society and
the most fashionable method of getting rid of her time. Nothing
whatever had happened to her, and she is now an ornament to society.
This story is not an invention; it is a leaf out of life. If this lady that
autumn day had bought a plain bonnet she would have continued on in
her humble, sensible way of living. Clearly it was the hat that made the
woman, and not the woman the hat. She had no preconception of it; it
simply happened to her, like any accident--as if she had fallen and
sprained her ankle. Some people may say that she had in her a
concealed propensity for frivolity; but the hat cannot escape the moral
responsibility of calling it out if it really existed. The power of things to
change and create character is well attested. Men live up to or live
down to their clothes, which have a great moral influence on manner,
and even on conduct. There was a man run down almost to
vagabondage, owing to his increasingly shabby clothing, and he was
only saved from becoming a moral and physical wreck by a remnant of
good- breeding in him that kept his worn boots well polished. In time
his boots brought up the rest of his apparel and set him on his feet again.
Then there is the well-known example of the honest clerk on a small
salary who was ruined by the gift of a repeating watch--an expensive
timepiece that required at least ten thousand a year to sustain it: he is
now in Canada.
Sometimes the influence of Things is good and sometimes it is bad. We
need a philosophy that shall tell us why it is one