rimmest is as
vain as woman, even when he stalks about bearded and battle-axed. This is
the mystery of preparation in your daughter's case: How does she breathe?
You have prepared her from childhood for the part she is to play to-night,
by training her form into the only shape which can be looked at with
complacency in any ball-room. A machine, called stays, introduced long
since into England by the Normans, has had her in its grip from early
girlhood. She has become pale, and--only the least bit--liable to be blue
about the nose and fingers.

Stays are an excellent contrivance; they give a material support to the
old cause, Unhealthiness at Home. This is the secret of their excellence.
A woman's ribs are narrow at the top, and as they approach the waist they
widen, to allow room for the lungs to play within them. If you can prevent
the ribs from widening, you can prevent the lungs from playing, which they
have no right to do, and make them work. This you accomplish by the agency
of stays. It fortunately happens that these lungs have work to do--the
putting of the breath of life into the blood--which they are unable to do
properly when cramped for space; it becomes about as difficult to them as
it would be to you to play the trombone in a china closet. By this
compression of the chest, ladies are made nervous, and become unfit for
much exertion; they do not, however, allow us to suppose that they have
lost flesh. There is a fiction of attire which would induce, in a
speculative critic, the belief that some internal flame had caused their
waists to gutter, and that the ribs had all run down into a lump which
protrudes behind under the waistband. This appearance is, I think, a
fiction; and for my opinion I have newspaper authority. In the papers it
was written, one day last year, that the hump alluded to was tested with a
pin, upon the person of a lady, coming from the Isle of Man, and it was
found not to be sensitive. Brandy exuded from the wound; for in that case
the projection was a bladder, in which the prudent housewife was smuggling
comfort in a quiet way. The touch of a pin changed all into discomfort,
when she found that she was converted into a peripatetic
watering-can--brandying-can, I should have said.

Your daughter comes down stairs dressed, with a bouquet, at a time when
the dull seeker of Health and Strength would have her to go up stairs with
a bed-candlestick. Your guests arrive. Young ladies, thinly clad