(Leonard and Virginia Woolf invited Dame Ethel*, then quite elderly, to dinner at their house at Rodmell in Sussex.)
"Dame Ethel bicycled the twenty miles from the village where she lived to Rodmell, dressed in rough tweeds.  About two miles from her destination she decided that perhaps she was not suitably dressed for a dinner party.  She thought that possibly corsets were required to smarten up her figure.  Accordingly, she went into a village shop and asked for some corsets.  There were none.  Distressed, she looked round the shop and her eye lighted on a bird cage, which she purchased.  About twenty minutes later, Virginia went into her garden to discover Dame Ethel in a state of undress in the shrubbery struggling with the bird cage, which she was wrenching into the shape of corsets and forcing under her tweeds."

[Ladies, next time you agonize over the appropriateness of your dress, enter the room confidently and think of Dame Ethel.] lbw

*British composer & author, Dame Ethel (1858 - 1944), The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, Clifton Fadiman, 1985.