SMOKING FOR WOMEN.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVI, Issue 57, 12 July 1913, Page 4

SMOKING FOR WOMEN.

A correspondent of tho "Manchester Guardian," writing on the subject of smoking for women, says the custom is now so universal in all the big capitals of Europe that a good many of the more fastidious women are reverting to the no-smoking condition, and it is not impossible that to refuse

a cigarette may soon be as great a sign of being in the movement as to refuse sugar in one's tea or to drinkit extremely weak, and China at that. At the moment the more watery your tea tho smarter you are. On the other hand those who really like the cigarette will not give it up, and the question is will they ever have to? In England they do not care to sec elderly ladies smoking, and many girls of the period sternly forbid thenmothers to touch a cigarette! "Oh! no, mother- it would not look nice at all," is not infrequently heard from the lips of a youthful "apache girl," who herself possibly begins to smoke before breakfast, and with black coffee! instead of the morning tea once' thought too deleterious for the young. The smoking habit came upon us gradually. At first it was almost surreptitious. Then it hecamo the fashion for men to offer their cigarette cases, still almost apologetically. Now the smart woman produces her own as a matter of course, gold matchbox and all, anywhere and everywhere, including most public restaurants. Indeed the list of presents to a London bride usually includes two or three cigarette cases from girl friends. Austrian women "go one better" than we do and smoke cigars. English hostesses have been embarrassed before now by the request of certain highborn ladies, grey-haired but still remarkably fine-looking, as Viennese ladies" so often are till a great age, to be allowed to smoke—the "Smoke" in

question being a cigar quite six inches long,, and the .occasion being a dance in the season. .. The "limit," however, is, he thinks, : supplied by a young actress just now much before the public who—occasionally—smokes a pipe !