Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/48

 equal to a disease. The movements are slow and painful, exercise is next to impossible, many little actions cannot be performed. She cannot button her own gaiter or stoop to pick up a pin. She is unequal to going up and down stairs, to shopping on foot, to dressing her own hair. Dancing, horseback riding, calisthenics, these are out of the question. Sluggishness of body soon brings sluggishness of mind, and her slowness to follow in conversation and her inaptness in repartee add themselves to the unfavorable impression her bulk produces.

We hardly know whether the opposite condition is not quite as deplorable. Who can admire hollow eyes, prominent cheek bones, sunken cheeks, angular and shrunken shoulders where the low-necked ball-dress displays at the most inopportune season the sharp collar bones and edges of the shoulder blades, the flat breast and narrow chest, the skinny arms, the shrivelled hands, and the thin ankles? How many a once plump and blooming girl answers this description after a few years of fashionable life, and neglect of simple and easy rules of health?

If we have drawn these sketches with inexorable fidelity, it is not to give an additional sting to those already painfully conscious of their unprepossessing aspect; it is only with a view to make the careless fully aware of their defects, and to inspire them with