The Savannah morning news. (Savannah, Ga.) 1900-current, 1902-03-09

! of the amethystine sea doesn't fill him
with thoughts, and thoughts, and
thoughts.
by the end of the first season she
is beginning to cut her wisdom teeth
on society, and she isn't so anxious to
be thought five years older than she
really IS, and her superior knowledge,
shows itself in her clothes. She is
pretty sure to go in, though, for gray
and real lace and substantial silks. She
also lightens up her conversation, and
quits trying to be soulful in sordid
world.
by the third season she has begun
to realize the value of simple little
frocks that give one a youthful figure,
| and you couldn't hire her with money
to put on a black velvet dress. She
has likewise dropped to the value of
dressing your part in life, and the
chances are that she has acquired
distinct style of her own. If she's tall
and Willowy, people begin to say she
looks like a Gibson girl. If she's
dashing, she goes in for tailor-made
things, while IL she's roly-poly, she
wears fetching little baby waists. Her
conversation has grown distinctly friv-
olous. She has found out that men
don't go out in society to be instruct
ed and If you see her sitting in dark
corner under the palms, with a man,
you may depend ON 1t she isn't spout
ing poetry to her escort. She is listen
ing as if she believed it while he tells
her that he is the greatest ever.
by the time she has reached her
fifth or sixth season she adopts the
simple book muslin and blue ribbons
of romance, and the waist buttoned
down the back. and If she isn't ex-
ceptionally string minded takes to
wearing her hair in schoolgirl loops,
tied with a ribbon bow, and her con-
yersation is of kindergarten simplicity
and artlessness.
"By the time she is thirty she has
learned enough to turn her back to the
light and make q serious study of
dress, for she knows that after one has
lost the freshness of youth, all the rest
is a matter of clothes. Many a woman
passes for a beauty whose only quail
hcation for the post is taste in mill
lnery. Clothes may not make man.,
as the old adage says, but they come
pretty nearly to making the woman,
and so l say it doesn't take any occult
power to read a woman's character by
her dress.
"Of course, all the more blatant
points anybody can see. The woman
who appears in a bedraggled skirt, or
gloves out at the fingers, or a solled
sloven for all the world to know, but
there are a thousand subtle indications
beyond these-the appropriateness the
daintiness, the harmony, that make
every woman's appearance tell the sec
rets of her character.
"What do you say?" some one asked
the dressmaker, who had entered the
room and was listening to the con-
versation.
Madame laughed and shrugged her
shoulders. "If / were to read charac-
ter by clothes" she said, Il should
conclude that most of my fellow-Wo-
men ought to be in the padded cell of
an insane asylum. Nothing. else fills
me with such despair of the intelli-
gence of my sex as the way they dress
and the things they waste good money
on.
Most women spend a good share of
their time and most of thinking capac-
ity on considering what they shall
wear and wherewithal they shall be
clothed, and it is simply appalling that
after giving the subject so much at
tention. they arrive at such poor re-
suits. You cannot walk the Streets
you cannot go down in a street car
without seeing some woman with hat
or gown that emphasizes every fault
she has in looks as emphatically and
plainly as If she had a placard around
her neck, saying: Observe this wo-
mans complexion Attention is
hereby called to this girls figure'
Their worst enemy couldn't do any
crueler thing to them than they do to
themselves. and yet one is absolutely
helpless, for the one thing that no wo-
man ever forgives is any criticism of
her taste.