FEMALE DEPORTMENT.
Why (asks Truth) cannot English girls be taught to move, walk, stand, and even laugh ? Even if they manage to enter a room with ease and self-possession, they lack that gift of grace that, when it is not natural, can be very well imitated by training. As to "standing at ease" not one Englishwoman in fifty can do it. They are given to resting their weight on one foot, and then transferring it to the other. As to laughing, how seldom, oxcept on the stage, do we hear a really musical laugh. Some girls make dreadful grimaces when they laugh. It runs in familes sometimes to distort the countenance in laughter. I know a family who laugh a great deal. Their eyes always shut up whon they do so, and it is the funniest thing when one dines with them, and something amusing is said, to look round the table, and see exactly the same distortion in every face. Thsre is not an eye left in tho family. Three sisters whom I know show quite half-an-inch of pale pink gum when they laugh. In their presence, like Wendell Holmes, one " never daree to be as funny as one can, for fear of seeing this appalling triple vision of gums."
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Bibliographic details
Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 2992, 27 January 1881, Page 4
Word Count
211FEMALE DEPORTMENT. Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 2992, 27 January 1881, Page 4
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