LADY SMOKISTS.

Observer, Volume 7, Issue 163, 27 October 1883, Page 18

LADY SMOKISTS.

Smoking is eaid to be a fashion with the ladies in some circles. There may, indeed, be cases where giddy girls, after elaborate precautions against discovery, venture to smoke a cigarette in their own apartments in companionship with other girls of similar ideas, but the smoking does not amount to much. The girls who smoke thus regularly are very few. There are isolated cases, too, where the ladies of the house indulge in the cigarette after luncheon, but they are usually people from European countries where the practice is customary. Married women seldom smoko unless they have more or lesß of a tendency to be fast. Ab a rule, men instinctively frown down any attempt on the part of their wives to indulge in tobacco. The attempt some years ago to make it fashionable for men and women to smoke a Russian cigarette after dinner failed signally. But there arc very many cigarette-smoking women in America who, although not exclusively or particularly refined, are still respectable. These women usually begin to smoke for the fun of the thing, and after they have kept it up a little while, find that the cigarette has as strong a hold on them as it has on messenger boys and dudes. Their husbands find it out, of course. The aroma of the common paper cigarette is not of an evasive and delicate character. When it is smoked in a room the odour is detected at once by anyone coming into the house. The husbands may frown it down at first, but they become accustomed to their wives smoking in time. Women of the kind in question are usually those who live in boarding-houses. They have no household duties, time hangs heavily on their hands, and they while away the tedium of the day by the aid of the cigarette, just as the idle man nods sleepily over his pipe. There is no reason to doubt that the number of women of this particular kind is very large, and that they are the largest class of consumers of cigarettes among the respectable members of their sex. Their daughters and unmarried sisters do not smoke so much, though they may occasionally indulge. The fact is that no girl in respectable society can be known as a cigarette-smoker and not gain a reputation for fastness.