The Way to Look Young.

Te Aroha News, Volume I, Issue 31, 5 January 1884, Page 5

The Way to Look Young.

Clara Belle says in one of her recent letters : " Given a small, straight, flat figure, with a face delicate in its features, and the problem of making a girl look like 15 until she is altogether past her teens is not exceedingly difficult. It can be very simply worked by refusing to let her petticoats grow to a mature length, eschewing all devices of bodice that produce ' artificial undulation, and enjoining an innocent simplicity ot carriage and manner. That was what had been done with the bride whom I have mentioned. There was in her family the usual incentive for thus retarding her apparent growth from childhood to womanhood. Two older sisters wished to matrimonially place themselves before their ages were emphasised by the youngest daughter becoming an adult. Why, I remember that one evening at a reception the dear girl came down to the parlour in a beautiful costume of white tulle, as simple and infantile as a christening robe, and with a hem no lower than the tops of her high boots ; but she had presumed to give a slight roundness to her corsage. That was an amendment to the family resolution which was immediately voted down, though she pleaded hard to carry it. " ' I'm a woman, and I want to look like one,' she pleaded. " ' You may be a woman, but you've got to look like child as long as nature will let you," was the maternal mandate. "She had to go back fc) the room and flatten the bosom in which indignation was swelling. " ' I'll develop all of a sudden, the first thing they know — see if I don't,' she said to me on that occasion. "And she did it on her wedding day, for certain. The dignified little creature who dragged a train up the central aisle of a fashionable church was no longer childish. Her babyish braids of hair had become an elaborate coiffure ; the ankles were out of sight, and instead of their stockinged dis play there was a disclosure of bare arms that were far more plump and tapering than anybody had expected, and as far as' eighteen years' seclusion could make them ; her bodice, for the first time, was shapely — by exactly what means, is none of the public's business. Improved? I should say so. If the bridegroom had fallen in love with her former aspect, he had every reason to augment his passion as he beheld her in bridal robes."