People who write dictionaries persist in calling a hat "a covering for the head." But has there ever been a woman lexicographer? If she were to exist to-day the entry under "Hat" would be long. Such as: "An article of clothing worn upon the head or carried in the hand; affording protection to the male and inducing baldness by insufficient ventilation; attached to the hair of the female by elastic, lethal weapons of steel, folds of velvet, or simple will-power; and in either case consisting of almost any material from steel (see Morion) to chiffon (see Textiles Development Board's Report, vol. c, appendix xelviii), and of any shape (see the History of Mankind; also under Euclid, Pudding-Basins, Soup-Spoons, the Taj-Mahal, and Etceteras)."
Really, you could do all that about the hat of to-day and to-morrow.
The high crown is dying a reluctant death at the hands—or heads—of wide-minded (and _wide-brimmed) about the hats that the spell-binders are to' wear at any"age.
They should be of fine, shiny straw, with some kind of simple-Simon flower (clover, dandelion, ranunculus, aconite) in the front. They may be made of the dress-material, set into fine straw brims. OF they can have a base of coarse straw, one-time and looking like a picture-hat in its outlines, only they always stop short of a really romantic curve. You get a shallow saucer, down-turned, on a soup-plate, up-turned, and then you put a clump, of flowers in front. Or you have an oval, bent over your brows, and escaping your curls at the back.
The rim can be bound. with a con-tresting colour, just to show your confidence in it, Or it can be of half-invisible stretched thin tissue, the crown and upper brim being of the material of your dress. Velvet ribbon on coarse straw, with rustic flowers, will be seen. Does anyone know why such sophistication as velvet ribbon, and the silkier the better, should marry so well with country straw and meadow flowers? Is it, perhaps, its depth of shadow
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.