And woman herself quite clearly perceives the force of association, the importance, if the significance of the hat is to be preserved and understood, of keeping it on her head. If this were not so why should we be confronted with the monumental paradox that our womankind are keeping their hats on in church and taking them off in places of amusement? At the theatre woman consents to be separated from her hat, and to have her hat separated from her. At her devotions she is not yet willing to commit this discord, and in the dim religious light it twinkles and shimmers its owner’s insistent dictum: The hat is the woman. In a thousand ways the hat declares the existence of occult meanings. A woman who would cut a man who wore a made tie, who would not buy a reproduced antique or pirated print, who knows Sèvres at a hundred yards and a real Bokhara in the dark, will cover her head with linen lilies and cotton-bloated roses. A woman who would hesitate to put a jewel in her hair, will heap upon the dyed straw of her hat festoons of glass and steel and wax, with the fretted carcass of a bird.
After all, there is no occasion to take hats seriously, unless you happen to sit behind one, which, of course, cannot always be happening. They are a wonderful study; there are so many different kinds; they have been talked about so much, and have filled so large a place in our lives, especially in public audiences. They have been discussed as widely and as fervidly as the Federal Constitution. Because of them, men have passed laws and sleepless nights. Because of them men fought duels in the last century and lawsuits in this. To make it possible to have them more refulgent and fetching, husbands and fathers have worked on Sundays and stopped smoking. Though it has been assailed with fanatical bitterness, buffeted by satire, stripped by statute, stoned by envy, disciplined by reform, the hat serenely survives, a defiant catalogue of every trait for which it ever has been either praised or condemned. From out the din of conflict and discussion it rises unscathed and unashamed the proud emblem of woman’s pictorial supremacy, which all nature has said must and shall be preserved.
And you know what she can do with a veil; she can make you forget that a veil is barbarous; she can make you forget that you shouldn’t like veils,—she can make you like her in one. She can make it increase her effect of preciousness, if that effect is in her line; or make it increase her sphinx-like effect, if that happens to be in her line. She no longer is extravagant in contriving them. Sarah’s was to cost a thousand pieces of silver. She now is content to make it a direct and specific instrument of illusion.
If the late Mr. Darwin had given serious attention to veils he would have remarked that the wearing of them has developed new expressions of countenance among women. When they wrinkle,—I mean the veils,—the wearer has a way of pursing her lips to push the silken gauze free from the end of her nose, having accomplished which, her fingers gently pull the thing into subjection from the lower hem. At certain seasons and under certain conditions the habit is strangely general, until you might think that woman, like the novelist in his last chapter, is always drawing a veil. The more expert can pull out the wrinkles by supplementing the pout of the lips with an indescribable wrinkling of the nose, and without calling assistance from the hand. I do not suppose that girls are educated to do this in any particular way, yet the uniformity of the habit is little less than astonishing.
Speaking of uniformity of habit, I have observed the same thing about her back hair. The gesture of the fingers with which a woman readjusts a hairpin, or, perhaps, simply ascertains that it is doing its duty, is wonderfully similar among all women. Yet the gesture may to a singular degree be a reflection of her personal style, and in that latitude for purely personal grace you sometimes are brought to the compensatory fact that in sitting behind the hat you also are sitting behind the hairpins.
This crowning glory of her hair! How it has fluttered in song and story! How it has shimmered here in comedy and there in tragedy! How it has dowered and decked and framed her, and puzzled us by its mysterious fickleness of color, now this shade, now that, on the same saucy, shapely head! How quaint a picture she can make for us when she masks it in powder and carries us back to the days of Copley or Watteau! How it has served to remind us, in some forbidden discovery of the crimping pin or the curl-paper, that from the beginning woman’s pleasures and her conquests have not been unmixed with pain!
How much fashion owes to hair and hair to fashion! How inexhaustible are the harmonies of line of which it is capable! How fascinating, by association, are the combs, and patillas and wimples and ferronières which have caressed and curbed it! We no longer dye it blue as the Greeks did, though we still, as the Greeks did also, produce blondes at pleasure. Far be it from this page to express any preference as between blonde and brunette. If, as we have been told, all of the poets from Homer to Apuleius doted on blonde hair; if Aphrodite was blonde, and Milton’s Eve; if Petrarch loved his blonde Laura (with crimps) and Boccaccio delighted in tresses of gold, who shall attach any more final significance to this than to the fact that woman at his moment is whimsically dressing her hair like Botticelli’s Grace?