Our friends, the ladies, have invariably been a source of wonder, but in this abstruse era they seem to have shattered previous records by a brazen attempt to lay bare the whole show and prompt us to apologize for our intrusion into polite society — with the spirit of the man who inadvertently opens the wrong bath-house door.
Times have changed, you say. Questionless they have, but we are old-fashioned enough to opine that the hoary gentleman with the scythe cannot condone everything. We will always hold, for instance, that the modus operandi of the boudoir should remain there, with an alibi — the whole show of the person, in private life, with a voice like a rusty lock.
Oddly enough, instead of admitting these idiosyncrasies as such, they generally see fit to conjure up some saner obsession, to salve the conscience, we fancy. Didn't we inquire of a young lady last summer, when the trick of rolling the stocking to a point of discrimination had grown into a ridiculous fashion? And didn't she strike us cold with the rather pathetic rejoinder that ladies of fashion where sense and comfort and discrimination are concerned? Not being able to laugh that down, we chanced a guess that those were common — too much! A bright-eyed buoyancy and the nonchalance displayed in theory, at the corner drug store, at least and not before —
Similarly, on Fifth Avenue or the Rue de la Paix, to feature them held up from the sides by a telephone cable swung around the neck, the ladies of discrimination would at once set out to bear the agony of lacerated flesh without the twitch of a plucked eyebrow. Similarly, the use of transparent materials into the day, and the shaving down of the evening gown to the garb of a three-inch degree whereat even the most hardened begin to whisper "daring," cannot help but excite our sensitive imaginations.
Is it, after all, a mere blind obedience to the mandates of the fashion-mongers, of followers taken up with the assurance that it is a subtle form of intrigue for flattery, matrimony, and whatnot? If that is the case, the ladies are plainly on the wrong trail; for they have the whole army of their defenders before them, and the movement is being parried by a new and subtle [unclear] — the dear old yesterday jogs along his path, comforted.
This, of course, is only part of a complex problem, and we see the defenders passing it lightly off and calling us prudes. Well, we have never yet been known to apply sobriquets to the spade, nor do we countenance the drawing of the curtains of respectability and see the beauty of central facts and romanticism — a perennial institution torn to tatters without one little wistful glance in the backward.
The sinner jogs along his path, comforted by the thought of the joy there will be in heaven when he repents.
ANTHONY GALT