Angel sleeves - I think that is the correct technical
term - and if the front of his coat is spangled over with the
largest-sized horn buttons obtainable he regards himself as being
dressed to the minute.
As for the women, I believe even the super-critical mantuamakers
of Paris have begun to concede that, as a nation, the American
women are the best-dressed women on earth. The French women have
a way of arranging their hair and of wearing their hats and of
draping their furs about their throats that is artistic beyond
comparison. There may be a word insome folks' dictionaries fitly
to describe it - there is no such word in mine; but when you have
said that much you have said all there is to say. A French woman's
feet are not shod well. French shoes, like all European shoes,
are clumsy and awkward looking.
English children are well dressed because they are simply dressed;
and the children themselves, in contrast to the overdressed, overly
aggressive youngsters so frequently encountered in America, are
mannerly and self-effacing, and have sane, simple, childish tastes.
Young English girls are fresh and natural, but frequently frumpy;
and the English married woman is generally dressed in poor taste
and appears to have a most limited wardrobe. Apparently the husband
buys all he wants, and then, if there is any money left over, the
wife gets it to spend on herself.
Venturing one morning into a London chapel I saw a dowdy little
woman of this type kneeling in a pew, chanting the responses to
the service. Her blouse gaped open all the way down her back and
she was saying with much fervor, "We have left undone those things
which we ought to have done." She had too, but she didn't know it,
as she knelt there unconsciously supplying a personal illustration
for the spoken line.
The typical highborn English woman has pale blue eyes, a fine
complexion and a clear-cut, rather expressionless face with a
profile suggestive of the portraits seen on English postage stamps
of the early Victorian period; but in the arranging of her hair
any French shopgirl could give her lessons, and any smart American
woman could teach her a lot about the knack of wearing clothes
with distinction.
In England, that land of caste which is rigid enough to be cast
iron, all men, with the exception of petty tradespeople, dress to
match the vocations they follow. In America no man stays put - he
either goes forward to a circle above the one into which he was
born or he slips back into a lower one; and so he dresses to suit
himself or his wife or his tailor.
