you can have one nice, white dress, and change the ribbons--sometimes
pink, sometimes blue, or any color that may happen to strike your
fancy--but sooner or later people will find that out; they will just
know it's the same dress with other ribbons, and it's a social deception
which fashionable society-idiots just will not tolerate. You must appear
in a new dress or an old dress, undisguised. Now, to-night, how was
I to know that Mrs. Babbington Brooks could afford to give so elegant
an affair, or in fact would be able to induce so large a number of
the best and nicest people in town to be present at this, her first
entertainment. People said it was going to be crude, perhaps
disagreeable. So I wore that pale-blue silk--old shade of blue--which
I almost ruined at the Monday-night German. When I entered the
dressing-room four or five of my best girl-friends affectionately kissed
me on the cheek, and exclaimed something about being so glad that I had
worn my pretty, pale-blue silk, and that it was so becoming; and was it
not that same "love-of-a-dress" which I had worn at the Monday-night
German? Now I really would believe those girls malicious if I did not
know they were--each one of the dear, sweet creatures--_perfectly
devoted_ to me; because they have told me of their devotion many
times, and I know they would not say any thing they did not mean--girls
in our set never do!

But this painful fact remains: my pale-blue silk is _not_ becoming!
I am entirely too dark to wear pale-blue, and I am just dying for a
terra-cotta. It's the loveliest shade in all the world! Papa likes blue,
so I ordered it to please him, because he is of the opinion that every
body looks well in that color, because mamma always looked well in blue
when she was young and beautiful. That reminds me what several old
married women said to me at the party to-night: "O, my dear, your mamma
was perfectly beautiful when she was your age! And she had so much