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formance to practice and display what we pick up from the bad examples set by the most ordinary type of people for whom some of us work.

Our fourth observation is that the Negro does too much "hanging out" for the moral and physical good of his home. We have a National Association of Exterior Decorators-Negroes who hang out. They are our greatest liability. They grease up our fronts, wear out our grass, break down our fences, and run down our neighborhood; use their homes as broadcasting stations and their mouths as loud-speakers. keep the ambitious ones of the race from getting where we are going.

They

Unfortunately, we cannot see through glass. We cannot see across the street unless we throw up the window and poke our heads out. Negro communities are infested with window watchmen. They are that class that throw up the windows and poke their heads out in order to see nothing. Go to any

thickly settled community if you want to "see the headline." Have you seen it in Harlem and other centers? Look up at the windows; it's there.

We are fighting segregation, but we cannot make very much progress until we put our Exterior Decorators to work hanging up instead of hanging out; cleaning up instead of greasing up; building up instead of breaking down. Some of the time that we spend in abusing white people for not allowing us to live in first-class neighborhoods should be devoted to the very practical duty of teaching interior decoration to our Exterior Decorators. They do more to keep us out of desirable neighborhoods than anybody else.

Fifth, our homes are suffering because we want to "keep up with the Joneses" in our own race. We spend entirely too much money to get things because other people have them, instead of spending the time developing ideals and standards because we need them. Then too many

women do not want the responsibility of housekeeping and caring for their children. This burning desire to "work out" is their alibi for not making homes for their families.

The sixth cause of the deterioration of the Negro home is ignorance. The Negro is not getting enough intensive teaching of the fundamental things of life.

Every Negro girl should be given a thorough course in the fine art of housekeeping and home-making. We should learn and apply the ideals and standards essential to the making of clean, orderly homes.

Seventh, the majority of us are just too plain lazy to keep our homes properly. We do too much sitting down after we get up. We do too much talking "about" and walking "out" when we should be setting our houses in order.

We have not learned that high ideals and industry are essential to the making of homes. There is no substitute for them.

English Schoolboys at Work

By CHARLES K. TAYLOR

This is the second article by Mr. Taylor on famous British schools. His comparisons of British and American methods of education are distinctly stimulating to thought

I

T is remarkable how greatly the foremost English preparatory schools differ from one another. There are some, like Winchester, for instance, representing the extreme of holding to tradition-almost any kind of tradition, as long as it really is one carrying on the traditional curricula, using the traditional customs and vocabularies, and thinking, no doubt, the traditional thoughts. And at the other extreme, perhaps, among the thoroughly rational and progressive schools is one, like Oundle, that has been, and still is, fearless in adventuring into new ways. And then, of course, we have fine schools like Cheltenham, holding firmly to longproved fundamentals and yet watching what the educational world is doing with keen eyes, ready and anxious to accept and adopt anything found to be valuable, either in method or subject.

From an English point of view, Cheltenham is quite a new school, being founded as late as the first part of the last century, though the architects concerned have been quite successful in designing and arranging buildings that would seem, at least, to represent a considerably greater age-something these islanders look upon as very important;

and, indeed, there is a good deal in this idea. We will achieve it ourselves in time.

At Cheltenham it was made possible to visit classrooms, to learn a little concerning methods and concerning a typical curriculum. The first impression received was that English boys work rather more intensely than do our boys, and put more school time to it. For instance, whereas we may have five lesson periods of about forty-five minutes per day for a boy of high school age, with an extra study period thrown in, these Cheltenham lads alternate seven and five period days through the we all lesson periods, and of fifty-five minutes each.

There is another significant difference in method-common to all the schools visited. Whereas all of our lesson periods are likely to consist in recitations on prepared work only, several periods in an English school may represent a combination of preparation and recitation. bination of preparation and recitation. For example, in an algebra class, although the class had looked over the principles involved previously, fully half of the period was spent co-operatively by master and boys, the former at the board, thoroughly analyzing the general

principle involved, and then taking up the usual problems and similarly analyzing them, until the principle involved was so obvious and clear to every one that when the class was put to work on the remaining problems of the lesson for the last half of the period those problems were solved with a celerity and accuracy never before witnessed by the present writer in many years of school experience.

There was a second achievement through use of this co-operative work: the boys learned how to study, the best methods of study-something so utterly left to the inexperience of the boys in so many of our schools that the time lost through inefficient work totals a prodigious amount of a boy's study time.

Visits to classes in Latin and in English found the same methods of approach in use. It is no marvel that the average preparatory-school graduate in England is far better prepared in substance and method than our boys.

In Cheltenham, too, I obtained a first real insight into the English "prefect" system, by means of which responsible seniors are held accountable for the behavior and to no small extent the character of their juniors. So seriously is all

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this considered that in few schools can a man be chosen "captain of cricket," for instance, unless he also possesses the

T

character and personality necessary for a prefect-a guide and adviser for worshiping young juniors. Just how this

works was made especially clear at Rugby, and will be considered in detail when that fine old school is studied.

Far-Flung Verse

A London Literary Letter by C. LEWIS HIND

HE book trade strike (it is the packers who are discontented) holds up many volumes, but the casual reader sees no diminution in the cataract of new books and reprints. Novels, of course, are still the most popular form of "literature;" but Most memoirs now run fiction close. eminent men seem to produce autobiographies.

A feature of the past year has been the issue of collected editions of the works of authors alive and dead. Among the living are Wells and Arthur Symons; among the deceased are Swinburne, Samuel Butler, and Anthony Trollope, in whose placid, interesting volumes there is a growing interest.

Anthologies of poetry drop from the press at the rate of two or three a week. They sell. Most people seem to glean their poetry from anthologies. An anthology at half a crown finds a host of readers.

There seems to be no young poet preparing to awake and find himself famous. Strange to say, the two most significant books of poetry published in the closing. month of last year were by two octogenarians Thomas Hardy, aged eightyfive, and Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, who is eighty-one. How different are these two men whose days are spent with poetry, making it and reading it! Hardy is, as ever, sad. Bridges is, as ever, joyous. Let me stress the contrast by quoting a characteristic poem by each. The sad poem by Mr. Hardy is called "The Weary Walker." He sent it to "The Bermondsey Book" as a mark of his appreciation of that excellent magazine, which is issued from "The Bermondsey Book Shop."

A plain in front of me,
And there's the road
Upon it. Wide country,
And, too, the road!

Past the first ridge another,
And still the road
Creeps on. Perhaps no other

Ridge for the road?

Ah! Past that ridge a third.
Which still the road
Has to climb furtherward-
The thin white road!

Sky seems to end its track:

But no. The road

Trails down the hill at the back.

Ever the road!

The joyous poem by Dr. Bridges appears in his new volume:

Mid the squandered color

idling as I lay Reading the Odyssey

in my rock-garden

I espied the clustered
tufts of Cheddar pinks
Burgeoning with promise

of their scented bloom
All the modish motley

of their bloom to-be
Thrust up in narrow 'buds

on the slender stalks
Thronging, springing, urgent,
hasting (so I thought)
As if they feared to be

too late for summer-
Like schoolgirls overslept
wakened by the bell
Leaping from bed to don

their muslin dresses On a May morning. . .

...

Let the reader muse on these two poems, so different, each written by an octogenarian.

A

LOVE of poetry knits people to-
gether. My article called "Second-
Best Poems: A Proposed Anthology,"
published in this journal on October 7
last, has brought me letters from places
so far away from London that I want to
send the senders a wave of greeting. A
correspondent writes from Richmond,
Virginia, asking for the title of a poem
by Whittier, mentioned in my article, of
which the first line is "When on my day
of life the night is falling." It is a poem
I have loved all my life. But the title?
I searched through anthologies and found
it not. So I bought "The Poetical
Works of John Greenleaf Whittier," pub-
lished by the Oxford University Press.
What a pleasure, what a stirring of mem-
ories, it was to go through the 569 pages
of poems by this Quaker poet! I shouted
with joy when on page 503 I found
this-

AT LAST

[Recited by one of the little group of relations, who stood by the poet's bedside, as the last moment of his life approached.] When on my day of life the night is falling,

And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown,

I hear far voices out of darkness calling

My feet to paths unknown.

Six other beautiful and touching stanzas follow, and on page 481 I found another favorite, "The Eternal Goodness," with twenty-two stanzas, and three of them, I suppose, are known (in quiet circles) wherever the English tongue is spoken:

I long for household voices gone,
For vanished smiles I long,
But God hath led my dear ones on,
And he can do no wrong.

I know not what the future hath
Of marvel or surprise,

Assured alone that life and death
His mercy underlies.

I know not where his islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond his love and care.

Such poems of simple, unalterable faith, the only right faith, are continually circling round the world. I tried to explain this in the introduction to my anthology called "100 Second-Best Poems" (yes, it got published). Laments, too, the yearning for home. I quoted one from memory-this:

Oh, carry me back to old Virginia,
There let me live and die,
Among the fields of yellow, yellow

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That no pretentious hand can stretch

And pull them from the sky.

If they were not, I have no doubt,
But some reforming ass
Would recommend to take them down
And light the world with gas.

Who dares to say that there are no rewards for the lover of poetry? A gentleman who read this, quoted from "100 Second-Best Poems," sent me a copy of the St. Louis "Globe-Democrat," which contained a whole page all

I

about "Uncle Joe Cannon, Now Nearing 90."

FINALLY, there is a poem that I want.

In an impassioned speech on British literature that Sir Johnstone ForbesRobertson delivered at the Authors' Club in London he referred, in moving terms, to a beautiful poem-"The text I have forgotten, the author I have forgotten, but the idea and purpose of the poem I shall never forget." He told us that he read it in the closing months of 1914. It

was by an "obscure school-ma'am" of Columbia University, New York, and the purport of her poem was that, even if Great Britain came under the yoke of an aggressive enemy, she could not be crushed, because of the great procession of writers from Chaucer even to our own times.

I want that poem. I will send an autographed copy of "100 Second-Best Poems" to the first correspondent who sends it to me, care of the Editor of The Outlook.

Why These Faces?

WISH I knew more about a lot

of things. Many very mysterious things continually perplex me. What makes sudden thoughts come out of nowhere at all; sudden pictures rise? I do not think that there is any one to tell me. Are there ghosts? Ghosts everywhere? Can it be that Tithrington and Clare Anthony are in California?

I've seen both Tithrington and Clare this morning, plain as pikestaffs. Clare, I know, is dead; shattered and buried in Flanders. I think that Tithrington must be dead, too. He was a sailor. I'll tell you about him.

Tithrington was the rummiest dick I ever did see. I don't remember his features so well. It was his rig that was peculiar. Tithrington joined the ship in Steveston, where she had taken on cargo of Fraser salmon for Liverpool. When he came over the gangway with the rest of the new crew, he appeared to be but an "able-bodied seaman," such as any other of them.

We sailed-I remember that the towline parted when we were just outside Flattery, and before we had any canvas set-on a fine, bright, sunny day. The sea was so beautiful that morning that words cannot tell of it. Night came starry, and I spent the first watch, eight till midnight, on the poop talking with the chief mate- who was later to die at Martinique and watching the stars and the sails that swayed against them. Next day was Sunday. The mate's watch washed the decks down and swabbed the paintwork between five and eight of the morning. That done, there was no more work for the day, unless it became necessary to trim the sails. The sea was as lovely as it had been upon the previous day. I know of nothing as peaceful as a first Sunday at sea in fine weather. The memory of beer halls, dives, sailors'

By BILL ADAMS

boarding masters, rackety pianos, glittereyed women, and the Seamen's Bethel is all become a dream, and one is conscious, though one cannot so express it at the time, that beauty is potent over evil.

After breakfast we apprentices sat on the main hatch, betting upon how fast a run she would make to Liverpool. We gasped when Tithrington appeared from the forecastle.

Tithrington was dressed in a black frock coat with long tails, black trousers, patent-leather shoes, tan gloves, and a silk top hat! A white shirt and collar, of course.

If you know anything of psychology, you know that there are some people who can do things that no one else can do and get away with it. Of such was Tithrington. A man to himself. None of us, none of the thirteen other ablebodied seamen, laughed or asked a question.

Tithrington's one desire in life was to be taken for a gentleman.

Later in the voyage, when we had come to know him, we found that his folks were plumbers in Liverpool. He told us of them, proudly. He was of no common stock, and, while himself a sailor and an excellent one, did not wish to be looked upon as such. PlumberPlumberbred, he was genteel. On the bulkhead over his bunk were a half-score photographs-all of himself, in various poses, in dress suit and top hat. No other pic

tures.

Every fine, bright Sunday from Puget Sound to Liverpool Tithrington appeared and walked the deck in his dress suit, top hat, and patent-leather shoes. When she came to moorings in Salthouse East dock, his family met him-plumber father, two plumber brothers, mother, and sister. They surrounded him and bore him away, in his dress suit, top hat, tan gloves, and patent-leather shoes. Of

us they took no notice whatever. He left us, his shipmates of five months, without a turn of the head, without wave of hand, or any greeting. We were but sailors.

At my elbow is a bowl with roses of a dozen varieties. On my desk are larkspur and sweet-william. Birds twitter by my window. The air is sweet and still. Why, of a sudden, after having been forgotten through all the years, has Tithrington appeared to me?

It was while I sat here ruminating on Tithrington that Clare came. I looked into his eyes-a child of thirteen.

Ages and ages ago Clare and I were playing with our tin soldiers on a bright Sunday morning. We planned battles and arranged conquests. Knowing naught of bloody horror or of shattered limbs, we gloried in military panoply.

An English child, Clare deployed his English soldiery, insisting that I turn Frenchman for that morning and give him combat with such legions of tin Frenchmen as we could muster from our toys. Among my tin men was a regiment of Belgian infantry-green helmets, green trousers, bayonets. We were very young.

"What," asked Clare, "are Belgians? Would they be on the side of France or of England?"

"I don't know," said I. Ages and ages afterward I hear his question, and my reply. I have just seen his face again.

When war came, Clare was at Camperdown, South Africa, with wife and babies. To-day, having responded to the appeal of one Kitchener, he lies in Belgian soil.

What for and why is this our life? Only the spirits know!

Is that why, this morning in California, both have visited me?

Some day all day will be spring Sunday morning. Is that it?

Ο

I

NE may taxi all over Germany nowadays over the roads I used to walk with knapsack and staff years ago and fly from practically any large city to another, or mail a letter by air post, following a well-standardized daily schedule; but other evidences of post-war efficiency are slowly and surely killing the romance that once made Germany foremost in art and story. There is a large percentage of die-hards, too, among the older residents of the former Empire, who are still heedlessly hindering the new generation of progressives in all walks and stations of life from establishing what will be undoubtedly one of the finest republics in history.

Returning to my old university town of Würzburg after a quarter of a century, I was much intrigued to see the drastic changes that have taken place there, and to observe at first hand the fight the young modernists are making against the soporific old régime influences that are so to speak-still biting on the sore tooth. Some of the old residents I used to know over twenty years ago were still bravely living over recollections of the past, and, with scarcely one exception, I found them still bemoaning the fact that all their savings had been swept away during the inflation period. All this was very natural. They could not realize that war has always bred such financial calamities, and that even America had had her Civil War suffering, with the vastly more terrible fighting of fathers against sons and brothers against brothers, to say nothing of her Valley Forge. So it is that when a man cuts his finger for the first time it seems to him that that is the first time a finger was ever cut.

These excellent old friends of mine, representing the best class of bourgeoisie, deserve our sympathy, for they worked hard and industriously at their gifted vocations in pedagogy, science, music, and literature only to find-through no particular fault of theirs that they must now finish their days with ragged rugs and economy of comfort that ill befit their distinguished old age.

"It was the French who were to blame," they told me. "We did not start the war," and as I listened further with indulgent sympathy, one estimable

By THEODORE STEARNS

old lady told me that on the streets of Wiesbaden to-day French soldiers arrogantly and deliberately push women off the sidewalks! Recollecting as I do how German officers used to elbow women on the streets of Würzburg thirty years ago when I was still a student there, I found it difficult to restrain a smile.

One of the most drastic changes I observed throughout Germany, from Würzburg to Hamburg, is that no soldiers are on the streets now. The former ever-occurring tramp of platoons on every principal street is nowhere to be heard and empty sentry-boxes all over the former Kaiser's realm are mute witnesses of a new order of things that have come to stay.

A fiery and progressive young director is at the head of the old musical conservatory where I studied, and he is introducing modern harmony in the former atmosphere of polite Mendelssohn and stern Bachian tradition. I attended an opera performance in the old theater where Richard Wagner held his first job -that of chorus director-and where we used to sit in the gallery with tiny candles lighting our scores as we followed the music along, and the mise en scène of that performance of "Othello" was modern, to say the least. The new system of a series of steps was its basis. Plastic drapes took the place of the former cutand-dried shabby interior sets. The tempos were startlingly virile and the Iago was a cross between a Mephisto and a Hamlet, with all the energy that both might have possessed. The conductor was a young man- -so is the intendant of the theater. The singing was negligible, but it was punctuated by a spirit of fire and youthful urge. The old opera fans of Würzburg frown upon these innovations. "It was never so," they told me, "in the old days of dignity and repose."

My old student haunts were still extant, but many of them were either closed up, turned into stores or bicycle shops or modern kitchen-range agencies, or were doing poor business. On the outskirts of the city, in the garden where I wrote my last counterpoint exercise, I found the garden plowed up and a hideous line of cheap, post-war laborers' two-family cottages ranged over the hill where we used to take our holiday walks and muse and dream. On another hill above the ancient city where picturesque

rows of poplars shaded the paths, those trees have been cut down and a huge airdrome is there, with booming planes regularly departing on their busy-beelike missions of commerce.

Mechanically, the famous old university city of Würzburg has, no doubt, progressed. It is an important railroad center, for one thing, and some of its new freight tracks reach as far as Veitshocheim, whose former Trianon-like gardens and swan ponds and privet mazes, built by one of the Bishop-Princes, are now sadly in need of repair and cindered. over with locomotive smoke.

ST

II

TILL undaunted by the weeds I was finding in the gardened romance of the country where I received my musical education years ago, I gladly accepted an invitation to attend the annual Saengerfest at Aschaffenburg, an interesting old city on the Main River between Würzburg and Frankfort. I was particularly anxious to stroll around Aschaffenburg once more, because it used to be a favorite haunt of my old teacher's father-in-law, Ignatz Stahl, a banner business man of Würzburg, an antiquarian and lover of nature of high repute, and a mighty hunter in his day.

Mr. Stahl had taken me under his personal charge when I appeared in Würzburg, a wild-eyed colt, and had done his best to chasten me, even calling my attention to the fact that in blacking one's shoes one must be sure that the heels also are carefully shined.

"You might be a grand-opera composer some day," he said; "and probably my son-in-law will teach you that if you write a score at all you might just as well make a neat job of it all around. I know very little about music except that a note belongs either on a line or in a space, and not half-way between the two."

It was Mr. Stahl who also showed me how to relieve the sting of a bee bite with a lump of soft clay, that incident having occurred, during one of our tramp trips, in the taproom of a strange little half-way house hidden far up in the Spessart Forest and called "Where the Foxes Say Good-Night."

It grieves me to state that the male chorus singing at that three days' Saengerfest in Aschaffenburg was not what it

used to be in similar festivals twenty years ago. The spirit was there and the desire to sing, but evidently the younger generation of German folk singers are restlessly thinking of other matters besides the good old Deutsche Lied. The volume was not there, for one thing, although they sang heartily enough when they got down to it, nor was the pitch as perfect as it used to be.

I am quite convinced that, excepting the big specialized professionals, of course, it is a case of divided aims when a group of German singers get together to-day. The great hand of Destiny seems to have stuck its finger into the soul of that splendidly musical race. They still love to sing, yes; but I sensed a lack of that complete absorption in their song that was so eminently characteristic of the song festivals I used to attend long before the war. In those days music was literally the only thing for the time being, and while they sang no amateur singer appeared to think of yesterday, to-day, or to-morrow.

To-day vacations are not granted to singers as easily as they were formerly. In several instances I was told that such a top tenor, or So-and-So-the prize baritone-was unable to attend the Saengerfest because he had not been able to get a leave of absence from his official duties. Perhaps this is one reason why in Aschaffenburg there was a certain distraction in the voices, as though, together with their fun, a new responsibility of more mundane cares was hovering over each note of the singers' songs. They seemed self-conscious; with the result that, while they may have enjoyed themselves, their music was neither commercial nor artistic.

Then there were those two empty sentry-boxes in Aschaffenburg, on either side of the old drawbridge leading to the gigantic castle in the center of the town. These silent testaments of the old régime still occupy their original places, and I am wondering why they are not carted away. They are ugly-looking affairs, with their crass blue-and-white diagonal stripes, like a barber's sign, and are surely not kept there for decorative purposes. Perhaps they are left there as a romantic reminder to the German Republic that militarism once reigned. Possibly they have been overlooked. More likely, there is no set procedure in the new order of things whereby a mayor or a town council can order their removal. And whom do they belong to now, anyway? The princes or the state? And who was the last sentry that left the last box, and where was that sentry-box stationed?

With a soldier and his musket standing at attention in front of the narrow opening, those sentry-boxes used to look picturesque. Now they seem like a child's forlorn painted wooden toy that has lost its Noah's Ark.

"B

III

UBE-KOPFS" (bobbed heads) are met with wherever you go in Germany to-day. They are not confined to the younger women alone, either, and perhaps more than any other single symbol this particular evidence of the emancipation of young and old has swept away the former gentle Gretel with the long locks and the meek, frowzy Hausfrau with an almost pathetic intensity.

Their hair is usually bobbed without much regard to the shape of their heads; and it struck me that the German women are not a race whose heads look well bobbed, anyway. The point is, that, like everything else they do, they have done it thoroughly. Together with the Bubekopf, your modern German girl and grown woman have adopted the short skirt-and it is exceedingly short, all things considered. With the usual the usual sturdy build of the average German woman, this combination is not always a happy one. Particularly when you add to this an unconquerable aversion "to face powder, which at least outside of Berlin-is evidently the Rubicon they hesitate to cross, although they have gathered their skirts up to escape the other waters of Modernity, apparently. Their honest sincerity excuses and offsets these evidences of bad taste, how

ever.

They are simply striving to adjust themselves to the new order of things, and, it might just as well be noted, are doing so far better and more quickly than their fathers, brothers, and husbands. As a matter of fact, it was a constant surprise to me to observe throughout Germany how vastly more interesting and progressive the new German woman is than the average German man. New domestic problems-the necessity of rearranging their housekeeping and culinary régimes without the old-time servants have brought a new striving for efficiency that is broadening immensely the minds of German women. They read more than they used to, for one thing. They are now continually investigating new ways and means and are keeping themselves posted in all up-to-date matters, from modern literature and world politics to modern kitchen appliances.

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German cities it was my privilege to be invited into many fine German homes, and the wide-awake conversations I heard there were revelations. Gone is the old-fashioned Kaffe-klatch of two decades ago, where pretty prattle was the order of the day. Clear-eyed young girls with silken crossed knees and chinlifted elderly dames led the talk into realms I had never heard of before in German homes and social circles.

If there is one thing that all women

high and low-hate, apparently, it is washing dishes, and consequently, interlarded with discussions about modern art, literature, the stage, and what Doug Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin had decided upon for their next picture, talk usually reverted to patent dish-washing machines and electric toasters.

"Is it true that all modern American housekeeping apartments are furnished with patent dish-washers?" they demanded.

"I don't know."

"They are probably not practical for small families-yes?"

"I suppose so," I answered. "But everywhere there are vacuumcleaners?"

"Probably."

"Can they be used with an alternating current?" flashed a young bube-kopfed matron.

"I can't say," I replied, humbly. She withered me with a glance of scorn. "You live in New York, and don't know?"

"But," I protested, gulping down a cup of coffee, "there are lots of things New Yorkers don't know."

A fine type of the new progressives in Germany was a young baroness I met in Berlin who has an ancestral castle in southern Germany. But she is not content with that. She is impatient to prove her worth, not as a social butterfly who is merely restless, but as an intelligent individual who demands a new and distinct self-expression that is independent of the bygone background of a race of kings. She has found that self-expression by going into the movies and making good there. Her young husband, the baron, is a most successful civil engineer.

Similarly, a young countess who is related by marriage to the former reigning family of Austria, when her family fortunes went to pieces entered a big dressmaking establishment in Berlin and worked as a saleslady. To-day, just six months after that, she owns and runs the most exclusive dressmaking establishment outside of the big couturiers of

In six different, representative large Paris.

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