Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/95

Rh upon a thunderbolt—a question hard, insoluble, beyond her powers of mastication. Besides, she was wholly unaware that the thunderbolt had been laid in her path expressly that she might exercise her teeth upon it.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Sabina Green picked corns, licked chalk and munched tobacco pipes, and the same thing goes on nowadays. There are tens of thousands of Sabina Greens with their mouths full, and with no appetite but for tobacco-pipes or thunderbolts. We have advanced—our pipes are now meerschaum—foam of the sea.

We have known young ladies who would touch nothing but meringues, and thereby seriously impair their constitutions and complexions. We have known others who could touch nothing but literary meringues, novels, and whose digestion revolted at solid food, but who crunched flummery romance at all times of day and night, till the flummery invaded their brains, filled their mouths, frothed in their hearts; and then tired of sweets they look out for what is pungent or foul—like the old tobacco-pipes.

An unwholesome trick into which German women fall is that of "naschen," of nibbling comfits and cakes all day long. They carry cornets of bonbons in their pockets, and have recourse to them every minute. They suffer much from disordered digestion, and fall into the green sickness, because they lack iron in the blood. How can they have iron in the blood when they eat only sugar? Our English girls have a similar infirmity, they nibble at novels, pick at the unsubstantial, innutritious stuff that constitutes fiction all day long. Do they lack iron in their moral fibre? Are their souls bloodless and faint with the green sickness? How can it be other on a diet of flummery.

The stomach of the nibbler never hungers, only craves; the appetite is supplanted by nausea. The symptoms of disorder are permanent; languor of interest, debility of