“Oh! Women.”
“Why?”
“There’s always some sense at the bottom of men’s fashions.”
“Even of docking tails?”
“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.”
“What is that you say?” I remarked.
He looked at me gravely.
“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!”