Page:Colymbia (1873).djvu/145

Rh looks and the beautiful play of their white rounded limbs.

As my intimacy with Julian and his family increased, I was thrown a good deal into the company of his lovely sister Lily. I was much charmed with her intelligence and winning ways. She was very curious about the manners of the ladies of England, and used to put to me the most embarrassing questions concerning them.

She could not understand the dresses of our ladies, with the external appearance of which she was well acquainted from the illustrated English works that frequently came into her hands.

"If the ladies of your country," she would say, "have to dress themselves in those complicated robes and change their costume several times a day, in addition to arranging and re-arranging their elaborate constructions of false hair, how can they possibly have time to do anything else?"

I replied that in fact many of them did little else, whereupon she expressed her wonder that they could be so enslaved to an occupation that, after all, was of no benefit, but only did harm to themselves.

I explained that it was by their elaborate costumes that many of our ladies endeavoured to obtain admiration more than by the qualities of their minds or by the agility of their bodies. Female dress, I observed, was considered usually as a means to an end, that end being the attraction of the opposite sex, with the view of forming matrimonial alliances.

"How dreadful!" exclaimed Lily, "I am sure I could not bear to be swathed in those terrible garments with their tight bands, pins and hooks-and-eyes.