MILLINERY MADNESS

or so

A HAT is of man's life a thing apart; 'tis woman's whole existence at least one would judge by the tense and concentrated faces reflected in the mirrors of 'Miss Hattie's Hat Shop,' as that specialist's consulting-room is euphemistically called.

The purchase of a hat should never be undertaken alone, any more than one should have one's teeth pulled out without a friendly face to confront one when 'coming out' of gas. And, by the way, what a good idea it would be to have a whiff of some anaesthetic applied to the victim who enters a millinery establishment to have twenty-five dollars painlessly extracted. 'Crownwork' is sometimes a nervous strain to the occupant of the dental chair. It is often an equally trying experience to the visitor in the millinery parlor.

To be sure the sight of a hat that seems designed by Fate or France to suit one's own particular contour and coloring frequently acts like a narcotic, and drugs one's conscience into complete subjection to the saleslady's wishes. No practitioners in psychoanalysis or hypnotic suggestion could more successfully subdue the conscious will and gain a mastery over the victim than the plausible Miss Hattie.

This is what happened when I went to look at hats not to buy them:

'Oh, no, madam, $29.87 is not at all dear for this little toque,' Miss Hattie protested to me when I faintly murmured at the price.

'What, you say that you don't wear feathers because you belong to the Auburn Society? Why, dear, auburn

hair like yours is very fashionable this season, only we call it henna now instead of red, and black feathers look real well with it. What, you don't wear birds' feathers? Well now, is n't that a joke! This is n't a bird's feather; it's just made out of whalebone! We don't mind killing whales, do we, and yet I suppose it hurts them to be shot more than it does birds, they're so much less fluffy.'

All this time the hat is being deftly pinned to my head. It is only by a supreme effort of will that I can tear it off, most of my hair coming down in the struggle; but I am determined not to be hypnotized into submission so early: it shows such pitiable weakness.

'I'm only looking, not buying, and I don't like that hat,' I insist; 'either it is too young or I am too old — in fact, I think the shapes are perfectly terrible this year. Now look at that -' And I pointed a finger of derision at what appeared to be a fruit-basket filled with oranges and bananas that was lying on the table beside me.

Suddenly a female more like a Fury than a Shopper bore down upon me with a look that froze my blood.

'You are speaking of my hat, madam, and it is not for sale,' she announced with bitter scorn. 'Perhaps you did n't know that yellow is all the rage this year.' And she flounced away bearing her agricultural exhibit with her. (Exit slave, bearing fruit.)

This experience unnerved me so that I felt a susceptibility to hypnotism stealing over me, of which Miss Hattie was quick to take advantage by producing head-coverings of other shapes and shades.

'How should you like something in the line of Burgundy?' she suggested, awaking pleasant memories of preprohibition days; 'or maize is very fashionable this year, as well as pelican. Then there is always bisque, or jade, or even wistaria.'

Where were the blues and reds that did not sail under false colors? Where were the browns of yesteryear? I tried to intimate, from my state of partial hypnosis, that, though I recognized the faces of all the colors she was introducing to me, I had forgotten their names. 'Now you just leave it all to me,' the skillful practitioner purred soothingly; ‘I have just the hat for you something refined, and at the same time snappy.'

She placed upon my fevered brow an austere and uncompromising pyramid, designed on the antediluvian lines of Mrs. Noah's hat, as remembered in my own early Noah's-Arkaic days.

'Say, I'm just tickled to death with the way you look in that hat,' my hypnotizer went on, making a few passes in front of my face, thereby completing her mesmeric success. "You're just stunning in it-perfectly stunning.' ("Yes, and stunned, too,' I murmured inaudibly.)

"The way the brim comes down and hides your face is just too becoming for words. Now I'm going to put your old hat in a piece of paper, because of course you want to wear the new one and I don't blame you not one mite.' Her deft fingers were working as fast as her tongue. She knew that I must not 'come to' while in her parlor.

'Now, here you are, Miss Smithkins. I'm so glad we had just what you wanted, and so cheap, too. Good-morning. Come again. — I remember the charge address.' And before I knew it I was in the street below.

My first coherent thought was that I had not even asked the price of the

hat I was wearing; and I did not entirely shake off my stupor till I saw my reflection in a shop-window and awoke with a scream.

ON OUR STREET

At the risk of being dubbed egotistically mendacious, I set down the fact that Pollyanna would have thrived on our street. The typical pessimist (somehow or other I have n't kept step with the pessimists well enough to know who he may be) would have shriveled up and died.

For on our street (and I set it apart in a paragraph to mark its importance) every woman is in love with her husband and her home, and every man is in love with his wife and his children.

And we are all poor. That is, in a material sense we are poor. We would n't trade places with Rockefeller, though, any of us. He has a bad stomach, you know. And we can eat our own fresh cabbage out of our own backyard gardens, and sleep the night through with never a hoof-beat of the nocturnal mare.

Every man and every woman on our street could participate with full privileges in the home-coming celebrations of several and sundry colleges scattered here and there over the globe. Mr. Witwer, with his Rhodes scholarship, makes this last statement possible. Therefore, the traditional spots may be knocked forever from the theory that college women make poor wives and poorer mothers. They do not. We can prove it on our street.

The age-limit on our street seems to be about thirty-five. The salary-limit, so far, has placed itself at three thousand; vide Mr. Witwer. The average is twenty-four hundred. But Mr. Witwer's little girl is crippled, and the difference must be devoted to medical attention for her. Last week the doctor

told us that in another year she may walk. The news made us all as happy as if it had been our own Dorothy or our own Mary. There are a number of little Marys on our street and a corresponding number of little Johns. We have no Gwendolyns or Percys.

On Saturday afternoons our young assistant professors and engineers work on our lawns and our gardens. They all wear khaki when they do it, and haul out their old puttees or boots. For every man on our street spent his allotted time in Uncle Sam's service, and each had a shoulder decoration. Some of the decorations extended to the left pocket-flap before they returned home. We are as proud of these as if the right were ours, individually, to stow them away in our cedar chests. And we are as proud of Mr. Towner in his olivegreen-and-red triangle as we are sympathetic of his fading sight that debarred him from more active service.

We share three or four 'by-the-day' women, to help us over the hard places, and, aside from a schoolgirl or two to help with the babies once in a while afternoons, we are servantless. Our husbands operate their own boot-black kits and pressing-boards. They boast about the shine on their boots and the lack of shine on their clothing.

We save our pleasure pennies for the movies, Galli-Curci, football, and Sir Oliver Lodge. We browse about the bookstalls for Einstein and Lansing, Kipling, de Maupassant, 'Opal,' and Peter B. Kyne. We all flivvered down to watch the bulletin-board report of the July bout, and came back with the thought predominant that peace with Germany had been consummated.

Are we some of the 'wild young people' John F. Carter, Jr., wrote about last September? Should n't wonder if we were. Our men were at Armageddon. One or two of our women were there. Most of us have an easy time

convincing our parents, when they park their Packard and Peerless plutocracy out in front of our houses and come in to romp with the children, that 'this is the life.' Our particular form of 'wildness' seems to be a reversion to lace-paper valentine days, to old-fashioned gardens, old-fashioned religion, and oldfashioned marriage days.

We're pretty happy on our street.

AN IMPULSIVE ODE TO A PICTURE
OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ON
A BOX OF SUGAR

(On or about his 215th birthday)
Great Benjamin! I cheerfully concede
That, to Miss Reed,
As hungry and half-ill
Along the streets of Phil-
adelphia you sped,
A-munching,
A-crunching

That loaf of baker's bread,
You may have seemed
Beauteous and sightly,
And have been deemed
A person rightly
To have a place

Cornelia J. Cannon, wife of the distinguished biologist, Professor Walter B. Cannon, will be remembered as the author of the striking paper, 'Can our Civilization Maintain Itself?' in the Atlantic for November, 1920. E. Barrington is a British traveler and scholar. That passionate pilgrim, A. Edward Newton, sends us a post-card announcing the consummation of his pious journey to Wales, where he has just placed a memorial nosegay on the grave of his 'Light-Blue Stocking,' Mrs. Thrale. Warren K. Moorehead, an archæologist of long experience and of recognized authority in his chosen field, and member of the National Board of Indian Commissioners, is Curator of the Department of Archæology at Phillips Academy, Andover.

***

Mrs. A. Devereux (Cornelia N.) writes to the editor from Albany that the experiences described in these letters befell her on the exact road which is now the Union Pacific R.R. The engineers who were so kind to us were part of the 1st Corps [commanded] by Maj. Gen. Dodge, sent out to survey the ground for the Union Pacific. The date of my husband's going out on the Plains,' [she adds]. . . is fixed in my memory, definitely, because he was all ready to put his horses in the wagon on Saturday, when, a last errand taking him to the business part of town, he learned of the death of Abraham Lincoln; and as he was Pastor of the Congregational Church in Council Bluffs at that time, he said he must wait to start on his vacation excursion, reopen the church, and preach a sermon to lead his people in their intense grief.

At ninety-three, she writes as vigorously as if the habit of correspondence were still strong upon her.

***

Charles H. Grandgent, for many years Professor of Romance Languages at Harvard, is a Dantean of wide reputation. Stuart P. Sherman, critic and philosopher, is Professor of English at the University of Illinois. Edgar J. Goodspeed is a professor of Biblical lore in the University of Chicago, who seasons his patristic learning with the love of strictly contemporary life. Emma Lawrence (Mrs. John S. Lawrence, of Boston) is a new writer, several of whose stories

L. J. S. Wood, the Rome correspondent of the well-known British Catholic weekly, the Tablet, has lived in Rome for many years, and has devoted serious study to the politics of both the Quirinal and the Vatican. Dr. A. Shadwell, the veteran Labor editor of the London Times, after practising medicine in his early days, has given himself up to the study of sociological and industrial questions. He has traveled widely and has investigated conditions in Canada and the United States, as well as in Russia, Germany, and England. Any personal characterization of Dr. Shadwell should mention the list of his amusements as he gives them in Who's Who. 'Recreations: being taken out by his dogs, fishing, music' the pastimes of a philosopher. Arthur E. Suffern, head of the Department of Economics at Beloit College, is the author of 'Conciliation and Arbitration in the Coal Industry of America,' which took the first prize in the Hart, Schaffner and Marx Economic Essay Contest in 1913. In 1914 he was made Special Investigator of the Coal Industry by the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations. Russell Robb is a member of the famous Boston firm of Stone and Webster.