Head-Hunters and Hat-Hunters.

If you had the nerve to pursue her through the wilds of Haberdashery and Lingerie, and touched her on the elbow, she would turn a dull eye upon you, murmur, “Take it away! I don't think it will wash well,” and stagger off into the darkest depths of this mysterious land of Thingamybobs and Faldelals.

No man would willingly watch his wife buy a hat. However hardened he be to human suffering, however tough and wiry his fibre, no man could stand by and see his wife transformed from a wife and mother to a hathunter.

It is said of head-hunters that often they are fond fathers and pleasant providers—apart from their ambition to get ahead. So it is with hat hunters.

When a woman selects a hat she keeps on selecting it until the shopwalker starts to make a shake-down under the counter and the night-watchman tunes into the bed-time stories on the radio.

First she glances at all the headwear displayed to view and sniffs.

“Seventy-five per cont of men's apparel in brought by women.”

page 43 Then she gives a rough idea of what she wants—or doesn't want, as the case may be; something not too large yet not too small, of a colour not too dark and not too light, with a little googley-gog on the side, like a friend of hers bought the season before last. The girl gives her a nasty look—as one woman to another—and proceeds to dig out all the hats under the counter as well as under protest. Your wife sneers audibly and tries on all the ones she knows won't suit her. Then she hops right in and tries them all on again—hats to the right of her, hats to the left of her, hats all over, easily five hundred!

Finally, when the girl is too exhausted even to sneer behind your wife's back, she (your wife) selects the one she sniffed at the hardest. She knows that it doesn't suit her, but she has had her fun and now is willing to pay for it.