Ladies' Column.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 230, 5 February 1876, Page 3

Ladies' Column.

EXTRAVAGANCE OF AMERICAN WOMEN. A New York paper says:—New York is crowded with rich unmarried men, afraid of the expense of supporting these gilded butterflies. There is a bachelor of the Fifth Avenue Hotel whose income is 20,000 dollars a year, and still he says he cannot afford to get married. He's a proud fellow, and says, as a single man, he can have the best rooms, and best box at the opera. " If I should get married," he said, " I would have to stint myself or overdraw my income." "How is that?" asked a friend. "Well, now, come into the parlor and I'll show you. You see ladies are extravagant now-a-days. They dress so much more than in Europe. I mean, they don't wear rich diamonds, like the women of Florence and Milan, but they wear such rich dresses, laces, shawls, and furs. Now, I'm. proud, and I would not want my wife outdressed, so I have to keep out of the marriage business. Do you see that lady there ?" he said, pointing to a fashionable caller. " Yes." "Well she has on a 400-dollar panniered, watteaued, polonaised, brown gros-grain dress, and I wear a 60-dollar coat. She wears a 1200-dollar camel's hair shawl, and a 500-dollar set of sable, while I wear a 70-dollar overcoat. She wears a 70-dollar bonnet, while I wear an 8-dollar hat. She wears 200 dollars worth of point applique and point ayuille, while I wear a 6-dollar shirt. Her shoes cost 15 dollars and mine cost 12 dollars. Her ordinary morning jewellery, which is changed every year, not counting diamonds, costs 400 dollars—mine costs 50 dollars." " Well, how does it foot up ?" " Why, the clothes she has on cost 2225 dollars ,and mine cost 206 dollars, and that is only one of her dozen outfits, while I only have—say three. The fact is," said he, growing earnest, " I couldn't begin to live in a brown stone front with that woman and keep up appearances to match—carriages, church, dinners, opera, and seaside for 20,000 dollars. I'd have to become a second-rate man, and live in an IS-foot house, or withdraw over to Second-avenue, and that I'll be hanged if I do : " and he slung his fist down into a nice silk hat in the excess of his earnestness. BLONDE AND BRUNETTE. It is clear that the nineteenth century is to be the century of blondes, like the sixteenth, just as the seventeenth century was that of the wig, and the eighteenth that of powder. All women are blonde nowadays, South as well as North, Nestor Roqueplan once said, " God gave blonde hair to the women of the North to console the men for having no sun." But now the Southern women make themselves blonde by the use of fairy waters, or simply by bathing their hair in ammonia. Some of them color, others discolor ; it is a miracle of chemistry. When, twenty-five years ago, that young madcap whom we called Ophelia at the Come'die Francaise first had the fancy of making herself blonde for a change, as she said, she never imagined she was introducing a fashion. Now both the New World and the Old have gone mad over it ; all women want to be blonde, especifcUy those who are gray. Silly violation of nature —for what is more sacred than a crown of white hair ? And has not dark beauty its characteristic attraction as well as the fair ? I saw recently a Russian princess who was renowned for her black hair and blue eyes, which gave her an incisive charm. Well, she wanted blonde hair also, and has succeeded in effacing her beauty. If the eyes have ravaged hearts since the creation of the world, the hair has also intoxicated many lips with its perfume. A king contemporary with Moses fell in love with a tress of hair which the-waves of the Nile brought to his feet. Was it not the hair of the Princess Mantirilis of the Nineteenth Dynasty, she who was surnamed the Palm? " The blackness of her hair is as the darkness of night." "She was still clad in her long hair when disarrayed. Her chevelure doubtless weighed 200 shekels, like that of Absalom. "Clad in her hair" is an expression which comes down from " Paradise Lost." St. Paul said to the Corinthians that long hair was the glory of woman. When Venus rises from the sea in her cortege of

Graces and Cupids, is she not incomparably beautiful in that garment of hair which shines over the rippling brine Uke a newer and softer sun ? For Venus was blonde, and Helen ; still fairer was Daphne : all antiquity worshipped fair hair. In all the poets fair is synonymous with beautiful. Mars was blonde like Achilles ; there is mention of a conqueror, a savage hero, who dyed his hair red, that he might have the mane of a lion. Messalina was dark, but she wore a blonde wig in her stealthy journeys to the Lupanar. Ovid raged in vain against these light wigs ; the Roman ladies persisted in buying their hair of the German and Gaelic women. In Brittany there is a song which says that for 2000 years the girls of the country have sold their hair, and to-day they furnish the same commodity to our fashionable ladies. But Venus, Helen, Daphne, and the rest did not buy those locks which " seemed like fine gold, and kissed her feet." There is an eternal dispute among lovers and poets over blonde and black. " Deck thyself in thy hair," said Sadi, _'' I will love thee like the night, and in thy presence I will forget the day." An Arab poet has said, " Thy black hairs flutter like the raven's wing." A Greek poet, " Thy hair is black and living like the cicala." Pindar sings of both black and golden hair, but Horace only of blondes. Ovid praises the dark beauty of Leda, but " Aurora was fair," he cries, dazzled by the rosy-fingered maid. Another poet has said that where the hair is of gold the neck is of milk. Where does the blonde begin and end ? Alfred de Musset said " Blonde as wheat." The Greeks spoke of " honey-colored hair." Adriatic honey, for the honey of the north is a paler blonde, like the hair of the Germans, the Swedes, and the Dutch women. It does not possess that warm Venetian tone which captivates all eyes. There is also that flaming gold which makes the Rousse, a beauty neglected in ancient times even more than now. Yet the Roman women sometimes gave their hair a fiery tinge the better to express the ardor of their sentiments. Solomon had already said to some of his 700 wires, "Why this royal purple on thy head?" Later, a prophet cried, "Why this color of blood upon thy hair ?" It was to recall the rising and the setting sun. The admiration of golden hair arises from the fact that light is the ideal of all beauty. Apollo, ac- ! cording to Ronsard, was all dishevelled with light. Homer compares his goddesses and mortals to the golden Venus. In history and in fashion, therefore, ive see the blondes triumphant, until such time as the brunes regain their empire. The North has conquered the South. People turn in Paris to look at black hair. Queen Isabel said to me the other day, "Is it not an insanity ? " The Queen holds her ground and refuses to dye her hair. She retains that Spanish coronet of jet black tresses until her time comes to assume the austere crown of white. But she would prefer to remain brune as long as possible, because her eyes are blue. It used to be said of royal personages, " She has pretty eyes, for a Queen." You could say of Queen Isabel, "She has fine eyes, for a woman." She does not presume upon them, however, for she says, " Good heart is better than good looks." —Arsene Houssaye in New York Tribune. THE TIED-BACK DRESS. The Boston Courier, in an article on the pinned and pulled back style of dress, would not make Greek slaves and Lady Godivas of the wives and daughters of the land, but neither would it have them so swathed in clothes as to refute to the eye all the anatomy of the books, and raise a suspicion that these lovely visions are constructed like mermaids. It is reasonable to presume, says the Courier, that God knows how to build a woman, and that having finished a piece of work of that kind, and pronounced it very good, he does not require or desire it to be so adorned that it can only be recognised in its structural grace and beauty by an act of blind and blundering faith. Hence, after these many years of multifarious and unserviceable wrapping, we are inclined to regard the pin-backed skirt as a revelation, with the finger of Providence in it, intended to revive confidence in the first chapter of Genesis, and to restore to a cheating and doubting world the old conceptions of the female form divine, which the ancients made classic in their history, their poetry, and their sculpture. It does not follow that all display should be sacrificed in this reformatory tightening of the front breadths of skirts. On the contiary, there is still room and to spare, for all the richness of texture and color that the most affluent can afford. The simple dress in which Homer enfolded Helen—the same that Aspasia and Cleopatra wore—wanted nothing in magnificence by reason of being so fitted as to reveal the outlines of the limbs. Petrarch's Laura had only two dresses for state occasions, both cut to fit the figure almost like a glove ; but the plainness did not prevent their being splendid with gay, profuse, and costly charms of hue and trimming. There is no limit, and there should be none, to the possibility of brilliancy in woman's attire ; only let the spectacle be honest, consistent, and harmonious. To quote from M. Blanc's studies in the line of art —for art it is, of persuasive and fascinative interest—" the picture should not be lost in the frame." The face alone is not all of feminine beauty, and it is not too much to say, with one of our greatest latter-day philosophers, that the woman who but casts a shadow of a graceful figure on the wall, confers a favor on the world. Good luck, then, to the pinned-back skirt, which suggests more in the way of wholesome and felicitous reform than all the woman suffrage schemes that uneasy brains have ever concocted.