"Had you no home ?" "Yes." "A good home ?" "Yes." "For what did you want money ?" "Clothes." "Gee, but I felt as if I would give anything for one of them willow plumes," a pretty sixteen-year-old girl told the police matron who had rescued her from a man with whom she had left home, because he promised her silk gowns and hats with feathers.
This ugly preoccupation with dress does not begin with the bottom of society.

It exists there because it exists at the top and filters down.

In each successive layer there are women to whom dress is as much of a vice as it was for the poor little girls I quote above.

It is a vice curiously parallel to that of gambling among men.

Women of great wealth not infrequently spend princely allowances and then run accounts which come into the courts by their inability or unwillingness to pay them.