Page:A hairdresser's experience in high life.djvu/59

Rh crowded with elegant people. Some who formerly went habitually to those far-famed watering-places, now cross the Atlantic and pass the season in Europe: others go over in May, purposely to supply themselves with a Parisian wardrobe, and return to Saratoga with a glittering display in August.

A lady informed me, last summer, that she had made a three-months' tour in Europe, with her family, and enjoyed herself very much, at about half the expense it would have required to pass three weeks at Saratoga, and not half the trouble. But fashion, in our country, is carried to an extreme which is positively vulgar, and I, the poor hair-dresser, can see it as well as the poor devils of husbands who have it all to pay for, and who are often reduced to penury and madness by the extravagance of their wives and daughters. I knew a lady—and her name is now notoriously known—whose habit it was to travel with fifteen trunks, containing a hundred and fifty costumes. These trunks were called by the gentlemen "young log-cabins." This lady was from the South, and was monstrous hard to please. It usually required her several days to get suitably roomed; and she grumbled and scolded continually, no matter how much pains were taken by her husband to please her. Poor Mr. W! no gentleman ever came to Saratoga more pitied than he was. He was pitied by some because he was hen-pecked, and despised by others for the little authority he asserted over his domestic affairs. But people may talk as they please on this subject, when a woman makes up her mind to govern, it is of no use for a man to interfere. Women are greater tyrants than men, all the world over. The