Every Evening, Wilmington Daily Commercial

JUDGING A GIRL BY HER CLOTHES.

It is a safe thing to judge a girl by the way she dresses. Her clothes are her shop window in which she displays to every passerby the line of brains and heart, and general characteristic she carries in stock.

Is a girl sloppy and untidy in appearance? Would her blouse be better for a visit to the laundry? Are her shoes run over at the heels? Does her suit need pressing, and her gloves and stockings darning?

She is lazy and trifling. She will make the kind of a wife who feeds her family out of paper bags, who wastes money, and against whose lack of thrift her husband will struggle in vain. By the time she is forty she will have degenerated into a fat slattern who lives in a frowsy wrapper, and eats chocolate creams all day, and reads silly novels, and who weeps because her husband and children like every other place on earth better than home.

But if a girl always looks spick and span, and as if she had just come out of a bandbox, it shows that she has energy, and pep, and the determination to achieve results, and get there. For it takes time and labor to keep well groomed, and only the woman who isn't afraid of work and trouble looks de luxe when she hasn't a de luxe pocket-book.

No psychologist has as yet explained the exact moral effect of corsets on the feminine character but there's a subtle and occult connection between the two. The woman who doesn't gird her waistline up, doesn't gird her mind up either. The woman who is sloppy in dress is invariably sloppy in her thinking.

She is never direct, concrete with a settled purpose in life, as is the woman who laces herself into her straight front as the warriors of old buckled on their coats of mail before they went forth to battle. Both of them are full of fight, and out to win. And they do it.

Therefore, if you want a flopping clinging vine of a woman pick out a stylish one. She'll be soft and mushy physically and mentally. But if you want a dependable, helpmate wife who will carry her half of the domestic load, choose one whose moral backbone is reinforced by good whalebone.

Does a girl always wear a hat that looks as if her worst enemy had picked it out, and clothes that turn a searchlight on her bad points instead of throwing the mantle of charity over them and distracting attention from them by emphasizing her good ones?

It shows that she lacks taste, and tact and the ability to make the best of things. Such a girl always fumbles the game of life. If her husband is rich she will spend twice as much on her establishment and get half the results another woman will. If her husband is poor she will never help him rise in the world, for she will never know how to make the right friends for him, or to give that illusion of prosperity that so often leads to real prosperity.

And always such a woman is vain, opinionated, and pigheaded, one of the kind who never take advice. Else she would realize her lack of clothes sense and go to a good dressmaker who would turn her out properly.

Does a girl go to business groomed in flimsy finery, and jingling beads, and bedecked in phoney jewelry?

It shows she has no judgment, and can not be trusted to handle matters that require good, hard common sense. No woman ever climbed the ladder of success in a beaded georgette blouse and spool heeled shoes.

But if she dresses for business in simple, plain waists, and tailored suits and shoes that permit her to think of her job instead of how badly her feet hurt, it indicates that she has intelligence, balance and the intention of making good as a worker instead of using the office as a husband hunting preserve.

Does a girl dress beyond her means?

It shows that she thinks more of her looks than she does of her reputation. Because she sets everyone wondering where she gets her finery, for sometimes she pays for her furs and imported gowns with everything that makes womanhood fine, and beautiful, and sometimes she buys them with the very life blood of her poor old father and mother.

The poor girl who looks like a Dail's hint from Paris makes a peevish and discontented wife, who is always envying rich women and who regards a husband as nothing but a cash register for her to punch. The man who marries her will spend the balance of his life dodging the bill collector, and give thanks to Heaven for merciful deliverance when she elopes with some other simp with a longer pocketbook than he has.

But the poor girl who wears simple frocks she makes herself, and whose clothes are no better than mother's, gives visible evidence that she is a sensible, unselfish daughter, and will make a man a good, considerate and thrifty wife.

Does a girl wear see more gowns that are cut for exceedingly high water in the skirt, and whose bodies are C in front, and V in the back and naught under the arms?

It shows that she lacks maidenly reserve, and doesn't know how to blush, and that a man need not censor his stories over much when he talks to her.

When a man gives the once over to a girl whose charms are as frankly displayed as a maiden's in the slave market she doesn't look like home and wife and mother to him.

But if a girl clothes herself in all the seven veils of modesty he sees in her the kind of a woman he wants for a life companion and to whom he isn't afraid to give his name.

It's a pity girls do not realize that they are judged by their clothes. Especially by men. Silly clothes make men laugh at their wearers. Extravagant clothes scare men off. Immodest clothes disgust men.

If girls knew this, perhaps there would be more sane dressing, and more wedding bells.