After studying the veracious and thrilling works of our modern dramatists, one comes to the conclusion that the lady with a past, though she may suffer from nothing else, does suffer tortures from tight boots. Whatever situation they put her in, however harrowing, pathetic or revolting, when boots would seem to be the last consideration of a tortured conscience, yet hers have that exquisite, brand-new perfection which proves that, when she is not planning wickedness nor torn by remorse, she spends the rest of her time buying boots, and we all know that new boots hurt rather more than a bad conscience.

It is also the happy destiny of this lady to wear the most superlatively beautiful clothes, and when, in moments of guilty emotion, she swishes her train about, we have a vision of petticoats which only she, indifferent to the voice of conscience and laundry charges, dares to wear; and still more damning witness than her petticoats to her evil conscience is the elegance of her feet. Your real hardened adventuress on the stage always wears the most delicious slippers, no matter how inappropriate to the occasion, but she wears them prophetically as it were, for she alone knows that she is destined to die in the fifth act, with her feet to the footlights.

To the social philosopher there is no more interesting sight than the window of a fashionable shoemaker's, there to make mental notes of the destiny of all those charming little shoes and slippers that confront one in all the coquetry of commerce. The only thing needed is a band to make them frisk about in all their gold, white, scarlet and bronze frivolity. The sophisticated curve of the satin heel and the tiny pointed satin toe are still innocent of worldly knowledge. Care, even in the shape of the daintiest foot, has not touched them yet, they have not been danced in, nor kicked off, nor made love to; in fact, they have not been born.

There is, however, a destiny for slippers as well as other things, and there is a certain slipper, long and slender, with arched instep and Louis XV heel which, so instinct tells us, is inevitably destined to belong to a lady with a past. Virtue never wears anything so subtle nor so pretty, for, indeed, it is only conscious rectitude that dares to dispense with coquetry, and wears her boots boldly down at the heel.

Given a woman's shoe, and one can easily evolve out of it her entire emotional history, just as a naturalist reconstructs from a bone the entire animal to which it once belonged. Not long ago I saw a famous German actress as Beata in Sudermann's play "The Joy of Living." It is a fine melodramatic part. She has a lover and a husband—familiar combination—but the sin is in the past, and they have all three reached that comfortable middle age when people are supposed to know better.

Unfortunately at the eleventh hour the husband discovers the secret of his wife's old faithlessness and his best friend's treachery. At a dinner in the last act Beata drinks a toast to "The Joy of Living," and promptly solves the riddle of existence by staggering into the next room and poisoning herself. It was as she staggered away that the German actress deprived me of all my illusions for, as she lifted her dress rather high in her anguish, she exhibited a pair of broad, flat boots, with patent leather tips, and the kind of heels only virtue wears, broad and flat and low. I thought I saw side elastics, but that may have been the effect of a perturbed vision.

However, from that moment I lost all belief in Beata's trials. A woman with such boots never takes her own life, never has a lover, never has a past, but she has a good sensible husband who falls asleep after dinner, and while he snores she knits him golf stockings. The audience was under the impression that Beata had killed herself in the next room, but I knew better. No, those feet were not made for tragedy, even Sudermann's art could not convince me, and so a pair of German boots spoiled my illusions.

It is not often that we poor philistines have the privilege of studying at close range the lady who may be truly described as the pet of the stage, and when we do so we owe it entirely to our kind dramatists; and find however much she and her sisters may differ in the details of their interesting careers, they have in common the transcendent charms of their toilettes and the fascination of their slippers.

When one sees how uninteresting the play would be without her, how often virtue is rather fatiguing and not nearly so well dressed, and how the dramatist gives his favourite the most interesting talk and the most dramatic situations, one realises her importance, and that she is quite indispensable to the stage, whatever she is in real life. One only regrets, when society is a little fatiguing, that she is not occasionally permitted to pass through in her gorgeous toilette and her immoral slippers, and that bewitching side glance which one only sees on the stage, just to make society, like the stage, a little more thrilling.

Now in the days of the older dramatists when much was left to what in this material age is fast dying out, that is the imagination, if the dungeon of Lord de Smyth was wanted, the scene-painter nailed up a sign-post with the simple notice, "This is the Dungeon of Lord de Smyth," and the audience were as much thrilled as if they could hear the clanking of the fetters.

In these days we refuse to take our dungeons so absolutely on faith, and, still, if we see a too beautiful creature in red hair (fascinating crime always has red hair), gorgeous clothes, and slippers with Louis XV heels—that estimable monarch was responsible for so much sinfulness combined with singular good taste—and an opera cloak all lace and allurement, the kind for which virtue has neither the money nor the taste, then we can settle down to a good three hours' thrill, for those perfect garments are as much an indication of the dramatist's intentions as in less sophisticated days the sign-post which announced the dungeon of the de Smyths.

We have learnt by experience that certain kinds of clothes always come to a bad end, though never until the fifth act; while virtue, without any nice clothes to comfort her, has a very bad time for at least four acts and a half. One could wish the dramatists would give virtue a better chance!

A very charming woman regretfully confessed to me that the old proverb, that virtue is its own reward, is distinctly discouraging. She felt, with a perfectly blameless existence behind her, that she had a right to demand of fate jewels more precious than imitation pearls, and a mode of transit more patrician than a 'bus or the "tube," or a four-wheeler on state occasions. Her bitterness was enhanced by a picture in the "tube-lift" of a lovely creature ablaze with diamonds, who advertises a firm of philanthropists from whom one can get one's Koh-i-noors on the instalment plan.

If ever a young person looks as if she had had a chequered past, it is this young person, so radiant, so self-satisfied, and so prosperous. She is a painful satire on virtue in a mackintosh with a dripping umbrella, who has no earthly hope of diamonds, no matter how she may long for them, and who stares drearily at the lovely being until she is bounced out upon terra firma, and then pushed into the rain by other virtues with umbrellas and very sharp elbows. The charming woman further declared that virtue should be offered a more substantial reward than imitation pearls these days when the shoemakers, dressmakers and dramatists form a "combine" for the exclusive glorification of the lady in question.

But it is not only the eloquence of slippers, but the eloquence of petticoats! Are not our shop windows the Frenchiest of French novels, divided not into chapters, but into petticoats? Do they not form flamboyant rainbows behind those glittering plate-glass fronts? That there is no one inside of them takes nothing away from their charm. To see them out-spread against a window—a bewildering chaos of colours, frilly, fluffy and fantastic, is the outward and visible sign of an inarticulate poet who lives sonnets in silk without putting them on paper. How much more satisfactory to live poems than merely to write them!

So every shop window proclaims that this is the age of petticoats. Who buys them, who wears them? Why are they never seen again? Yet well may we ask what sylph can worthily wear those coquettish fantasies? It must be conceded, though it will hurt out national pride, that only the women of one nation have that sovereign right.

It is the Frenchwoman alone who can lift her skirts with that supreme elegance which turns even the worst mud puddle into an instrument for the display of her exquisite grace. She is the artist of the petticoat—and if she lifts her skirts rather high, it is because she does not feel it her duty to help the County Council to sweep the streets with the tail of a draggled gown.

Now when an English woman lifts her skirt, she does it as one on business bent; coquetry is not in it. She makes a frantic clutch at the back of her skirt, grabs a solid handful, and drags it uncompromisingly forward until she outlines herself with simple, cruel distinctness. Her silhouette is a curious study in angles.

Though she has no coquetry about her feet or her petticoats, the fatality of fate ordains that she should always wear high-heeled slippers and cobweb stockings in that downpour which Divine Providence reserves exclusively for the English nation. This opportunity she also takes to wear those lace petticoats which, having survived the terrors of the British laundry, succumb to British mud. Heaven, in its inscrutable wisdom, has denied to the Anglo-Saxons and Teutons that subtle turn of the wrist which makes the lifting of a skirt a fine art. Even the American woman, conqueror though she be of dukes and lesser things, has never yet conquered that Latin grace.

Now who buys those silken rainbows in the shops? Get the sphinx to answer that riddle if you can. Do they vanish into space, or are they bought by those radiant beings who flit about in electric landaulettes, and whom we never meet, because we flit about in 'buses?

If the rainbow ever touches earth it is on exceptional occasions which only prove the rule. And it is always when virtue, always elderly and stout, with big, flat feet in cloth boots, lifts her skirt and exhibits to the eye of the public a yellow or scarlet silk confection which hangs limp and dejected. Its melancholy flop and want of rustle plainly show its consciousness of being misunderstood and in a false position. The irreproachable petticoat, sacred to the eminently respectable, is usually black and of a material of the nature of horsehair. No shop boasts of it, and it is always pulled out of an ignoble pile when required, and is quite Spartan in its unadorned simplicity.

That virtue is best adorned by itself we concede; still virtue is a little handicapped. I put it to the dramatists: Why not give her better clothes and let her for once triumph in the second act? The dramatists, inspired photographers of manners though they are, have a great deal to answer for! At best they give her a white dress, a blue sash, ankle-ties and no conversation. One asks how is she to compete with a stately creature with dramatic red hair and that sinuous and glittering costume fraught with tragic situations? What a fatal contrast when studied by the youth of our land who have been taught to regard the stage as an educator!

The stage is conceded to be a great educational and moral force, and yet I beg of those excellent gentlemen who provide the lessons that the stage so eloquently recites not to lavish on the lady in question that bewildering wardrobe which must give her a sense of peace and calm security that even a good conscience cannot bestow. For once put her into a bargain coat and skirt left over from a sale at Tooting, adorn her with a tam o'shanter, the kind with a quill that sticks out in front, and put on her feet the boots of a perfect propriety, always short and broad, then see if the pit will adore her!

No, the pit will not adore her at all, for say what you will, it is the clothes that sway the earnest and indiscriminating lover of the drama. For once put virtue in a gossamer peignoir, the clinging, fascinating kind, and slip her number six feet into a number three satin slipper, and how the pit will rise at her as one man, as they have never done before, and take her to their hearts, for human nature is as yielding as putty to grief that wears nice clothes and is well scrubbed. Unfortunately the world is full of undramatic tragedies that are all the more tragic because of a dire need of soap and water.

As the educator of a public swayed by the eloquence of a slipper and moved to tears by the pathos of a petticoat, one can but beg and implore our dramatists, even at the risk of making their dramas less thrilling, to give virtue a tiny bit of a chance—for a change.