The mistress.  I wish, for my part, that everybody who has time to eat a dinner would dress for that, the principal event of the day, and do respectful and leisurely justice to it.

The young lady.  It has always seemed singular to me that men who work so hard to build elegant houses, and have good dinners, should take so little leisure to enjoy either.

Mandeville.  If the Parson will permit me, I should say that the chief clothes question abroad just now is, how to get any; and it is the same with the dinners.

II

It is quite unnecessary to say that the talk about clothes ran into the question of dress-reform, and ran out, of course.  You cannot converse on anything nowadays that you do not run into some reform.  The Parson says that everybody is intent on reforming everything but himself.  We are all trying to associate ourselves to make everybody else behave as we do.  Said—­

Our next door.  Dress reform!  As if people couldn’t change their clothes without concert of action.  Resolved, that nobody should put on a clean collar oftener than his neighbor does.  I’m sick of every sort of reform.  I should like to retrograde awhile.  Let a dyspeptic ascertain that he can eat porridge three times a day and live, and straightway he insists that everybody ought to eat porridge and nothing else.  I mean to get up a society every member of which shall be pledged to do just as he pleases.

The parson.  That would be the most radical reform of the day.  That would be independence.  If people dressed according to their means, acted according to their convictions, and avowed their opinions, it would revolutionize society.

Our next door.  I should like to walk into your church some Sunday and see the changes under such conditions.

The parson.  It might give you a novel sensation to walk in at any time.  And I’m not sure but the church would suit your retrograde ideas.  It’s so Gothic that a Christian of the Middle Ages, if he were alive, couldn’t see or hear in it.

Herbert.  I don’t know whether these reformers who carry the world on their shoulders in such serious fashion, especially the little fussy fellows, who are themselves the standard of the regeneration they seek, are more ludicrous than pathetic.

The fire-tender.  Pathetic, by all means.  But I don’t know that they would be pathetic if they were not ludicrous.  There are those reform singers who have been piping away so sweetly now for thirty years, with never any diminution of cheerful, patient enthusiasm; their hair growing longer and longer, their eyes brighter and brighter, and their faces, I do believe, sweeter and sweeter; singing always with the same constancy for the slave, for the drunkard, for the snufftaker, for the suffragist,—­“There’sa-good-time-com-ing-boys