The intrepid general was rallying her wavering female troops.
"Women," she cried, "will you give way to mannish fears?"
A muffled murmur of indecision ran through the ranks.
"Shall it be said we are clothed in male armor?" shrieked the general.
The murmur became a mumble.
"Will you," fiercely demanded the general, "show the white feather in a season when feathers are not worn?"
The effect was electrical.
"Never!" roared the soldiers. And, forming into battle array, they once more hurled themselves upon the enemy.
"You criticize us," said the Chinese visitor, "yet I see all your women have their feet bandaged."
"That is an epidemic," it was explained to him, gently, "which broke out in 1914. Those are called spats."
Little Tommy at the "movies" saw a tribe of Indians painting their faces, and asked his mother the significance of this.
"Indians," his mother answered, "always paint their faces before going on the war-path--before scalping and tomahawking and murdering."
The next evening after dinner, as the mother entertained in the parlor her daughter's young man, Tommy rushed downstairs, wide-eyed with fright.
"Come on, mother!" he cried. "Let's get out of this quick! Sister is going on the war-path!"
Mrs. Will Irwin said at a Washington Square tea:
"The more immodest fashions would disappear if men would resolutely oppose them.
"I know a woman whose dressmaker sent home the other day a skirt that was, really, too short altogether. The woman put it on. It was becoming enough, dear knows, but it made her feel ashamed. She entered the library, and her husband looked up from his work with a dark frown.
"'I wonder,' she said, with an embarrassed laugh, 'if these ultra-short skirts will ever go out?'
"'They'll never go out with me,' he answered in decided tones."
Those reform preachers who designed the moral gown for women did a good job. Now to design a woman who will wear it.
FAIR CUSTOMER (to salesman displaying modern bathing suit)--"And you're sure this bathing suit won't shrink?"
SALESMAN--"No, miss; it has nowhere to shrink to."
POLICEMAN--"Lost yer mammy, 'ave yer? Why didn't yer keep hold of her skirt?"
LITTLE ALFRED--"I cou--cou--couldn't reach it."
When ladies wore their dresses very low and very short, a wit observed that "they began too late and ended too soon."
FAIR CUSTOMER--"I'd like to try on that one over there."
SALESMAN--"I'm sorry, madam, but that is the lampshade."
The Fifth Avenue Bus having stopped, the lady at the top of the stairs was slow in descending. "Come on down, lady," said the conductor in a bored tone, "legs ain't no treat to me."
FATE
All human things are subject to decay, And when fate summons, monarchs must obey.
--_Dryden_.
All are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time: Some with massive deeds and great, Some with ornaments of rhyme.
--_Longfellow_.
Fate holds the strings, and Men like Children, move But as they're led: Success is from above.
--_Lord Lansdowne_.
One ship drives east, and another west With the self-same winds that blow; 'Tis the set of the sails And not the gales Which decide the way to go.
Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate As we voyage along through life; 'Tis the will of the soul That decides its goal, And not the calm or the strife.
FATHERS
"Dad," said a Bartlesville, Okla., kid to his father the other night, "I want to go to the show tonight."