Before I could comment on my friend’s narrative we were spattered with mud by passing riders, and stopped to repair the damage to our coats.
“Jolly for my new coat!” I said. “Do you notice, by the way, that they are cutting men’s tails longer this spring? More becoming to a fellow, I think.”
He raised those quizzical eyebrows of his and murmured:
“And horses’ tails shorter. Did you see those that passed just now?”
“Nonsense!” I said. “My dear fellow, you really are obsessed about beasts! They were just ordinary.”
“Quite—a few scrubby hairs, and a wriggle.”
“Now, please,” I said, “don’t begin to talk of the cruelty of docking horses’ tails, and tell me a story of an old horse in a pond.”
“No,” he answered, “for I should have to invent that. What I was going to say was this: Which do you think the greater fools in the matter of fashion—men or women?”
“There’s always some sense at the bottom of men’s fashions.”
“You can’t compare it, anyway,” I said, “with such a fashion as the wearing of ‘aigrettes.’ That’s a cruel fashion if you like.”
“Ah! But you see,” he said, “the women who wear them are ignorant of its cruelty. If they were not, they would never wear them. No gentlewoman wears them, now that the facts have come out.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” he asked, “that any woman of gentle instincts, who _knows_ that the ‘aigrette,’ as they call it, is a nuptial plume sported by the white egret only during the nesting season—and that, in order to obtain it, the mother-birds are shot, and that, after their death, practically all their young die from hunger and exposure—do you mean to tell me that any gentlewoman, knowing that, wears them? Why! most women are mothers themselves! What would they think of gods who shot women with babies in arms for the sake of obtaining their white skins or their crop of hair to wear on their heads, eh?”
“But, my dear fellow,” I said, “you see these plumes about all over the place!”
“Only on people who don’t mind wearing imitation stuff.”
“You need not look at me like that,” he said. “A woman goes into a shop. She knows that real ‘aigrettes’ mean killing mother-birds and starving all their nestlings. Therefore, if she’s a real gentlewoman she doesn’t ask for a real ‘aigrette.’ But still less does she ask to be supplied with an imitation article so good that people will take her for the wearer of the real thing. I put it to you, would she want to be known as an encourager of such a practice? You can never have seen a _lady_ wearing an ‘aigrette.’”