And then he said that in hospitals (for this strange creeter had peered round everywhere in search of knowledge), he had seen some of the terrible effects of tight lacin’ and high-heeled shoes.
He said that he had seen cases of blindness, caused by the last, and a destruction of the nerves.
In lacin’, he had seen dretful cases of internal diseases, incurable, and had seen terrible diseases in infants, caused alone by this destructive custom of the mothers—young infants who, if they lived, must carry a maimed body through life with ’em, caused alone by this habit.
Sez he, “Compare these high-heeled shoes with the loose, comfortable sandals that our own women wear. And these painful steel waists, that compress the lungs and heart, with our own women’s loose, flowing garments,” and he wuz astounded at our ways.
Wall, I agreed with him from the bottom of my heart, but sech is poor human nater that it kinder galded me to have my sect so sot down on and despised by a heathen. And I, kinder onbeknown to me, brung up their own veiled wimmen. “And,” sez I, “every country has its own shortcomin’s; I don’t like the idee of your wimmen havin’ their faces all covered up with veils.”
My tone wuz kinder het up and agitated.
But his voice wuz as sweet and calm as the evenin’ breeze a-blowin’ over a bed of Japanese lilies.
“Yes,” sez he, “perhaps we err in that direction, in veiling our women too much from the public gaze.
“But,” sez he, “I went to a grand party once in your great city Chicago, and to one also in Washington, and I see the women’s forms almost entirely disrobed and nude, while great folds of cloth trailed after them down on the floor. I knew not where to look for shame, for even when I was a nursing babe in my mother’s arms, I could not have witnessed such sights.
“And while we Eastern people may err in the direction of veiling the charms of our women-kind, methinks you Western people err still further in the opposite direction. At these public parties I saw the naked forms of the women, displayed with far more than the freedom of the courtesans in my own country, and my heart sank down with shrinking and wonder at the strange customs of civilization.”