From a Girls Point of View | Page 7

with ribbons,
they must be changed often to freshen the gown, whose only beauty is
its freshness. Deliver me from a soiled or stringy white party-dress! If it
can be worn five times during the winter, the girl is either a careful

dancer or else a wallflower. In either case, after every wearing she must
have it pressed out and put away as daintily as if it were egg-shells, all
of which is the greatest nuisance on earth. Often such a gown is torn all
to pieces the first time it is worn. Scores of "simple white muslin"
ball-gowns at a hundred dollars apiece are only worn once or twice.
Now take the "extravagant" girl with her flowered taffeta silk, or plain
satin, or brocade dress. There is at once the effect of richness and
elegance. No matter how sweet and pretty she is, you at once decide
that you never could afford to dress her. But that taffeta cost, perhaps,
only a dollar a yard. The satin, possibly a dollar and a half. They
require almost no trimming, because the material is so handsome and
the effect must be as simple as possible. Such a gown never need be
lined with silk unless you wish to do it. Many a girl gets up such a
gown for fifty or sixty dollars. And then think of the service that there
is in it. It does not tear, it does not crush. When she comes home she
looks as fresh as when she started. When it soils at the edge of the skirt,
she has it cleaned, and there she is with a new dress again. Do you call
that extravagant? Why, my dear sirs, it is only the very rich who can
afford to wear "simple white muslins!"
There is a hollowness about having a man praise your gowns when you
know he doesn't know what he is talking about. When a man praises
your clothes he always is praising you in them. You never will hear a
man praise even the good dressing of a woman he dislikes; while girls
who positively hate another girl often will add, "But she certainly does
know how to dress."
And so the experienced woman wears her expensive clothes for other
women, and produces her "effects" for men. She wears scarlet on a cold
or raw day, and the eyes of the men light up when they see her. It
makes her look cheerful and bright and warm. She wears gray when she
wants to look demure. Let a man beware of a woman in silvery gray.
She looks so quiet and dove-like and gentle that she has disarmed him
before she has spoken one word, and he will snuggle down beside her
and let her turn his mind and his pocket-book wrong side out. A woman
could not look designing in light gray if she tried. He dotes upon the
girl in pale blue. Pale blue naturally suggests to his mind the sort of girl
who can wear it, which is generally a blonde with soft, fluffy hair, fair
skin, and blue eyes--appealing, trustful, baby-blue eyes. Did you ever

notice that men always instinctively put confidence in a girl with blue
eyes, and have their suspicions of a girl with brilliant black ones, and
will you kindly tell me why? Is it that the limpid blue eye, transparent
and gentle, suggests all the soft, womanly virtues, and because he
thinks he can see through it, clear down into that blue-eyed girl's soul,
that she is the kind of girl he fancies she is? I think it is; but some of the
greatest little frauds I know are the purry, kitteny girls with big,
innocent blue eyes.
Blazing black eyes, and the rich, warm colors which dark-skinned
women have to wear, suggest energy and brilliance and no end of
intellect. Men look into such eyes and seem not to be able to see below
the surface. They have not the pleasure of a long, deep gaze into
immeasurable depths. And so they think her designing and clever, and
(God save the mark!) even intellectual, when perhaps she has a wealth
of love and devotion and heroism stored up behind that impulsive
disposition and those dazzling black eyes which would do and dare
more in a minute for some man she had set that great heart of hers upon
than your cool-blooded, tranquil blonde would do in forty years. A
mere question of pigment in the eye has settled many a man's fate in
life, and established him with a wife who turned out to be very different
from the girl he fondly thought he was getting.
Yet whenever I complain to experienced married women of how
discouraging it is to wear your good clothes for