One day—­it was in the autumn—­this lady had occasion to buy a new hat.  From a great number offered to her she selected a red one with a dull red plume.  It did not agree with the rest of her apparel; it did not fit her apparent character.  What impulse led to this selection she could not explain.  She was not tired of being good, but something in the jauntiness of the hat and the color pleased her.  If it were a temptation, she did not intend to yield to it, but she thought she would take the hat home and try it.  Perhaps her nature felt the need of a little warmth.  The hat pleased her still more when she got it home and put it on and surveyed herself in the mirror.  Indeed, there was a new expression in her face that corresponded to the hat.  She put it off and looked at it.  There was something almost humanly winning and temptatious in it.  In short, she kept it, and when she wore it abroad she was not conscious of its incongruity to herself or to her dress, but of the incongruity of the rest of her apparel to the hat, which seemed to have a sort of intelligence of its own, at least a power of changing and conforming things to itself.  By degrees one article after another in the lady’s wardrobe was laid aside, and another substituted for it that answered to the demanding spirit of the hat.  In a little while this plain lady was not plain any more, but most gorgeously dressed, and possessed with the desire to be in the height of the fashion.  It came to this, that she had a tea-gown made out of a window-curtain with a flamboyant pattern.  Solomon in all his glory would have been ashamed of himself in her presence.

But this was not all.  Her disposition, her ideas, her whole life, was changed.  She did not any more think of going about doing good, but of amusing herself.  She read nothing but stories in paper covers.  In place of being sedate and sober-minded, she was frivolous to excess; she spent most of her time with women who liked to “frivol.”  She kept Lent in the most expensive way, so as to make the impression upon everybody that she was better than the extremest kind of Lent.  From liking the sedatest company she passed to liking the gayest society and the most fashionable method of getting rid of her time.  Nothing whatever had happened to her, and she is now an ornament to society.

This story is not an invention; it is a leaf out of life.  If this lady that autumn day had bought a plain bonnet she would have continued on in her humble, sensible way of living.  Clearly it was the hat that made the woman, and not the woman the hat.  She had no preconception of it; it simply happened to her, like any accident—­as if she had fallen and sprained her ankle.  Some people may say that she had in her a concealed propensity for frivolity; but the hat cannot escape the moral responsibility of calling it out if it really existed.  The power of things to change and create character is well attested.  Men live up to or live down