From a Girls Point of View | Page 6

tell a real untruth. But they have a way of
persuading themselves that what they are about to say is the truth.
Women must believe in themselves before they can hope to make other
people believe in them; therefore they have themselves to persuade first
of all. Now, when men are going to utter an untruth they never care
whether they believe it or not, as long as they can make other people
believe it. And the so-called brutal honesty of man is only brutal want
of tact. That poor, patient, misused word, "honesty"! How sick it must
get of its abuse!
Yes, girls really believe, I suppose, that they dress for other girls. But
they do not. They dress for men. And only experience will teach them
the highest wisdom in the matter. But that they cannot acquire until
they believe that only another woman will know just how well they are
dressed, and, above all, whether Doucet turned them out, or a
dress-maker in the house at two dollars a day.
Men only take in the effect. Women know how the effect is produced.
Of course, now I am speaking of the general run of men and women:
neither the man who clerked at Cash & Silk's nor the one who pays his
wife's bills in Paris, but the man in his native state of charming
ignorance of materials; the man who always suggests a "gusset" as a
remedy for too scant a gown, who calls insertion "tatting," and who, in
setting out for the opera, will tell his wife to put on her "bonnet and
shawl," although she may have on point-lace and diamonds. In his
more modern aspect he tells you that a girl at the Junior Promenade had
on a blue dress with feathers around her neck--which you must translate
into meaning anything from blue satin to organdie, and that between
dances she wore a feather boa.
It is the effect only that men take in; and when a man goes into
ecstasies over a gown of pale green on a hot day just because you look
so cool and fresh in it, when you know that you paid but forty cents a
yard for it, and only nods when you show him your velvet and ermine

wrap, which cost you two hundred dollars, I would just like to ask you
if it pays to dress for him. Women know this from a sorrowful
experience. Girls have to learn it for themselves. A ball-dress of white
tarlatan, made up over white paper cambric, with a white sash, will
satisfy a man quite as well as a Paris muslin trimmed with a hundred
dollars' worth of Valenciennes lace and made up over silk. Most of
them would never know the difference.
I do not know whether to be sorry for these men or not. It must be
lovely not to agonize and plan and worry to have everything the best of
its kind. I would like to take in only the effect, and never know why I
was pleased. Too much analysis is death to unmitigated rapture. You
always are haunted by knowing exactly what is lacking, and just how it
could be remedied. But these dear men are singularly deluded in many
ways, and upon these delusions clever women play, as a master plays
upon an organ. And young girls, who have not had time to study into
the philosophy of it--how should the poor things know that clothes
have any philosophy?--as usual, have to suffer for it.
One of these delusions is the "simple white muslin" delusion. When a
man speaks of a "simple white muslin" in the softly admiring tone
which he generally adopts to go with it, he means anything on earth in
the line of a thin, light stuff which produces in his mind the effect of
youth and innocence. A ball-dress or a cotton morning-gown is to him
a "simple white muslin."
Now a word with you, you dear, unsophisticated man. I have heard you,
with the sound of your hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month salary ringing
in your ears, gurgle and splash about a girl who wears "simple white
muslins" to balls; and I have heard you set down, as extravagant, and
too rich for your purse, the girl who wears silk. There is no more
extravagant or troublesome gown in the world than what you call a
"simple white muslin." In the first place, it never is muslin, unless it is
Paris muslin, which is no joke, if you are thinking of paying for it
yourself, as it necessitates a silk lining, which costs more than the
outside. If it is trimmed with lace, that would take as much of your
salary as the coal for all winter would come to. If trimmed