Most suspicions are unjust.  And if you ask me to give reasons for this unreasoning hostility to astrakhan, I do not know that I could find them.  Perhaps it is the dislike I have for artificial curls; perhaps it is that the astrakhan collar reminds me of those unhappy pet dogs who look as though they had been put in curl papers overnight and sent out into the streets by their owners as a poor jest.  Yes, I think it must be that sense of artificiality which is at the root of the dislike.  No doubt the curls are natural.  No doubt the woolly sheep of Astrakhan do wear their coats in these little heaven-sent ringlets.  But ... well ...  “I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.”

But fur-lined coats, with fine fur collars, are quite another affair.  If I had the “magic nib,” I could grow lyrical over them.  I could, indeed.  In place-of this article I would write an ode to a fur-lined coat.  I would sing of the Asian wilds from whence it came, of its wondrous lines and its soft and silken texture, of its generous warmth and its caressing touch.  I would set up such a universal hunger for fur coats that the tradesmen in Oxford Street and Regent Street would come and offer me a guinea a word to write advertisements for them.

And yet I shall not buy a fur-lined coat, and I will tell you why.  A fur coat is not an article of clothing:  it is a new way of life.  You cannot say with reckless prodigality, “Here, I will have a fur coat and make an end of this gnawing passion.”  The fur coat is not an end:  it is a beginning.  You have got to live up to it.  You have got to take the fur-coat point of view of your relations to society.  When Chauncey Depew, as a boy, bought a beautiful spotted dog at a fair and took it home, the rain came down and the spots began to run into stripes.  He took the dog back to the man of whom he had bought it and demanded an explanation.  “But you had an umbrella with that dog,” said the man.  “No,” said the boy.  “Oh!” said the man, “there’s an umbrella goes with that dog.”

And so it is with the fur-lined coat.  So many things “go with it.”  It is in this respect like that grand piano to which you succumbed in a moment of paternal weakness—­or after a lucky stroke in rubber.  The old furniture, which had seemed so unexceptionable before, suddenly became dowdy in the presence of this princely affair.  You wanted new chairs and rugs and hangings to make the piano accord with its setting.  Even the house fell under suspicion, and perhaps you date all your difficulties from the day that you bought that grand piano, and found that it had set you going on a new way of life just beyond your modest means.