Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/69

 to do away with it. An avoidance of the cause, and appropriate gymnastic exercises promise the most.

We have previously remarked (page 29) that writers and painters, sitting as they usually do, with one arm elevated, holding the pen or brush, and the other at rest or nearly so, almost certainly come to have one shoulder higher than the other. This gives the whole bust a one-sided appearance, eminently unpleasing. Young ladies who are of a literary turn of mind, therefore, or are artistically inclined, and yet whose devotion to ideal and intellectual beauty does not quite lead them to the neglect of that physical beauty which nature has bestowed on them, will act wisely to correct this tendency by constant care and exercise.

A bad habit or some local weakness occasionally leads to holding one shoulder slightly in advance of the other, or to bringing them both forward, giving the chest a hollow, "dished" appearance, exactly the reverse of what it should have.

Such a conformation is the more unsightly in woman, as she has naturally a more prominent chest than man. Her collar-bones are longer, and her shoulders are pressed by them farther outward and backward, in order to give room for spreading that banquet for an unborn guest, which it is her duty and her destiny to furnish. There should be no salient bones or angles, but the outline should sweep in a series of gentle curves from the neck downward, each slightly in