A hundred years later the government resorted anew to this law to curb the excess in another shoe fashion; and this time the excess concerned the shoe's width, not its length. For the dandies of that

age had begun to imitate King Henry IV, who — as his great bulk required, having two broad feet — wore shoes ten inches wide. So the law limited them to six inches.

Yet fashion did not stop in its excess at this limit, but went beyond it to height. Some two thousand five hundred years ago the women of Greece strutted through the streets of Athens in shoes with high cork soles three inches thick.

And four hundred years ago the heel proper was invented. Curiously, it was invented to help the horseman keep his foot fixed in the stirrup; but fickle fashion exploited it for its own caprices and intro-duced several changes into it. Thus the nobles of the court of James I, king of England, wore shoes with high red heels — a fashion that many ladies imitated afterward. Ladies' shoes in that era possessed great grace: they had high heels and laces around the joint between foot and leg, and were made of soft leather or brocade. The sons of the democratic middle class wore flat shoes with a tongue jutting forward, adorned with square steel buckles. And these fash-ions are still current today, with some modification.

The passion for high heels reached its utmost at the court of Louis XIV, king of France, in the seventeenth century. The ladies of this court wore shoes six inches high, and so they minced along on the tips of their toes; indeed, their inability to walk properly was proof that they were ladies of wealth and ease, accustomed to strutting in their beautiful clothes, not to walking ordinarily like the rest of the daughters of the common people.

The truth is that high heels — in reasonable propor-tion — can add to the grace of the elegant woman. They not only add to the height of her figure; they make her feet look smaller. And they not only steady her movements; by tightening the muscles of the calf, they clothe her legs in a garment of slenderness and beauty of form. Add to this that the strangeness of woman's taste is what endears every new fashion to her and makes her feel pleasure and elegance.

Models of modern summer shoes, from which you may see how history repeats itself