FOR WOMAN'S VANITY, DEARLY BELOVED, IS THE ONE AND INDISPENSABLE PRESERVER OF HER HEALTH.
A woman cannot be pretty, according to her own notions, unless
HEALTHY.
If too fat, she is not pretty—and she is miserable until, through self-control, she gets thin.
If too thin, she is not pretty. At present she has a crazy sort of idea that to be "skinny" is to be attractive. That is a passing delusion. In the long run women realize that there is nothing beautiful about a female living skeleton, and they strive through normal living to become normal.
Above all, no woman can have a good complexion unless she have good health and live normally. This one absorbing question of complexion does more for woman's health; it gives us more strong mothers, and more sensible girls, than all the preachings, beseechings, prayers and expostulations of all the world's male advisers.
A woman's instinct is to eat buckwheat cakes, adding boiling hot coffee and iced water. She likes to eat candy between meals, and her idea of a fine luncheon is lobster salad and ice cream. But small spots appear. Those fine pink cheeks get too pink or too pale, and sensible eating is adopted as a life rule.
Even the hideous corset squeezing is counteracted by the power of complexion. Woman likes to look like a wasp, and if she could she would move her poor system all out of place for the sake of a waist hideously small.
But, providentially, a waist squeezed too mercilessly gives a bright pink tip to the end of the nose; and for the sake of the color of that nose-tip the poor waist gets a rest—the corset is let out.
It cannot be denied that among idle, nervous women to-day there is a tendency to take stimulants to excess, and even to smoke abominable cigarettes.
Alcohol, fortunately, ruins the complexion. And for the sake of their looks women often deny themselves and show a strength of resolution that would not be called forth by any moral appeal.