“Only on people who don’t mind wearing imitation stuff.”
I gaped at him.
“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.’ ”
“What!” I said. “What?”
“So much for the woman who knows about ‘aigrettes,’ ” he went on. “Now for the woman who doesn’t. Either, when she is told these facts about, ‘aigrettes’ she sets them down as ‘hysterical stuff,’ or she is simply too ‘out of it’ to know anything. Well, she goes in and asks for an ‘aigrette.’ Do you think they sell her the real thing—I mean, of course, in England—knowing that it involves the shooting of mother-birds at breeding time? I put it to you: Would they?”
His inability to grasp the real issues astonished me, and I said:
“You and I happen to have read the evidence about ‘aigrettes’ and the opinion of the House of Lords’ Committee that the feathers of egrets imported into Great Britain are obtained by killing the birds during the breeding season; but you don’t suppose, do you, that people whose commercial interests are bound up with the selling of ‘aigrettes’ are going to read it, or believe it if they do read it?”
“That,” he answered, “is cynical, if you like. I feel sure that, in England, people do not sell suspected articles about which there has been so much talk and inquiry as there has been about ‘aigrettes’ without examining in good faith into the facts of their origin. No, believe me, none of the ‘aigrettes’ sold in England can have grown on birds.”
“This is fantastic,” I said. “Why! if what you’re saying is true, then—then real ‘aigrettes’ are all artificial; but that—that would be cheating!”
“Oh, no!” he said. “You see, ‘aigrettes’ are in fashion. The word ‘real’ has therefore become parliamentary. People don’t want to be cruel, but they must have ‘real aigrettes.’ So, all these ‘aigrettes’ are ‘real,’ unless the customer has a qualm, and then they are ‘real imitation aigrettes.’ We are a highly-civilized people!”