The True Belles.

Auckland Star, Volume VI, Issue 1671, 26 June 1875, Page 5 (Supplement)

The True Belles.

ABeookltn writer goes so far as to say: ' The belles you read of are the belles to avoid ; the belles of whom you hear not are the belles to make your home with, if you, can possess them. There are hundreds of these in quiet and elegant residences. "Whether mothers or grandmothers, they have some of the spiritual bloom of their younger days left. Their loveliness does not disappear in the bath, and is not put on again before breakfast. Their beauty is not of the surface, simply. They do not go out of fashion, for their fashion is that of nature. Pleasant remembrances have they of. their girlish time. They do not recall, as other belles may, the maddening waltz in the flushes of the dawn, the late supper, and the glass too much of champagne, the stolen kiss, and the burning blushes hours after. Perhaps they have been overstrained; perhaps the latter half of the nineteenth century has not entered into, *them enough; perhaps they are prudes; perhaps they have not exercised to the fullest their glorious privilege of liberty. They are, nevertheless, good, pure, genuine women, whether they be girls or mothers or grandmothers.'