All the world has come, perforce, to that state of mind, body, and purse when it is busy tightening its belt.
There isn't enough of everything to go round; or, if there does happen to be enough of some commodity, people haven't enough money to pay for it. Certainly, there are very few people—and industrial troubles and trade slumps are making them still fewer—who now have money to spare for luxuries.
Yet the luxuries continue to be made and bought.' Whether they get paid for is another matter. Apart from jewellery, which the average man and woman are not buying just now, clothes are an easy first in the expenses item.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.