"There was a time" Mr. Comyns Carr has been telling the Wool Safeguarding Committee, "when people would pay x little more for a more durable garment. The young lady of to-day regards durability as a positive disadvantage. She wants to spend as little money as she can and have the opportunity as often as possible of having a new dress."
To this at least one woman utters fervent "Hear! hear!" Human health and cheerfulness must have increased enormously with the gradual dwindling of the number of old clothes in the worl'. Even now wa drag about our dead selves with us more than we should by wearing other women's clothes—the clothes the happy women or the wretehed women we may have been a few months ago.
A Fores hers One of the at effective ways of committing partial suicide every day, and" thus encouraging new growth, would be to burn all ove "garments every night, or retura them to the pulping machines, and each morning put on fresh things. 'The fresh things would have to be "contrived at about, hal! a crown a Set, and they could bear no more resemblance to the beautiful, ela-Derately made clothes of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance than, say, paver picnic plate docs to' ths loveliest silver-gilt dish in the Brownlow collection, but they: would be our clothes, not those of on? ghosts of yesterday. shiftless as any of her predecessors who went about showing bare heels.
'The elderly woman may want to know what we have done with all the time that once had to be spent on darning and patching and the unpleasant' rebinding of wide and trailing skirts, and some of us might find poor enough answers, or even be short of an answer at all. Mending was what William Morris used to call "hard easy work," in that it required long but not very intense application. It gave tine for contemplation—which one does not get at bridge or tennis or golf, or, at least, not without rousing the contempt, if not the fury, of one's fellow-players, and contem-lation is surely as necessary to the really civilized human being as symbolic rites are to a stage. Working women have, as a rule, ult daily journeys which give them time for musing, but not 0 richly as the old mending hours did.
Not What She Looked the looks as though she never sews," complained an okt woman the other day of a young one she @id not like, and who had one of, those fashionable faces, that we call Our fashion-harvie foremothers, tad toy les of new clothes odic onthe pea r, boyish because' of tha lack happening 3] the average boy was aliens fequonty ins they do today, Would more secretive and inexpreseng the Probnbly. have vessel tht out ¢hanges of mode would be infinitely. the average girl.) This particular more fantastic and rapid than girl actually made all her own theirs, but, in fact, now that our clothes, cutting them out with a dresses ave more quickly worn on dash from familiar patterns and our fashions last longer than ever. running them together on a sewing-machine with a cigarette meanwhile In the days when turned" and even well-to-do "we: the okd woman was Fight She did Stirs wore het obliquely in her mouth," Bu anon had" one otto not Took as though ake sewer
ton drenea, a) new. dees was unlike tridents of painting Peshape afew centares hence wil old one.
Desperate gambles} just when the sea Lael re made when next year's sleeves banal expression tout of women's might look cither like legs of mut. faces.
Leonardo's Manna Lisa looks ton or like empty belaters, and poor as though she had done lots of relations who had to suffer the mending, despite th ignominy of wearing up the dresses hands, and one can imagine almost 3 of their rich aunts and cousins went one of Eotticelei's Mado ludicrously leg-of-muttoned among pouting over an eyelet-hole or the the bole, quay Tudievous among the logs of sewing bolstered lok salva gui be
portraits of modern women, for all Always the Same the increased capability. of thei But now a girl interested inher ards and eyes. appearance will order another thin We shall hi inthe suit exactly: like the one which she days when we has alrendy worn thin at the elbows and, when it comes. henie, immediately make raye dusters of the old one. One of the half} daren women who are called the beatedreseod wanton in hors sets of the sam Jor a clean different colours and changed their outline in the past!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.