Perfumes are used sparingly by elegant people, yet a touch, a vague sense of fragrance, does add something of daintiness to a girl's toilette. It is right for you to have perfumes about you if you love them.
Fresh rose-leaves thrown into your bureau drawers and scattered in the boxes where you keep your laces and handkerchiefs, and sprigs of lavender or lemon verbena left there to dry will impart a pleasant sweetness to whatever lies among them. Orris-root powder in little sachet bags of China silk, or strewn lightly between folds of tissue-paper, will give to your clothing in closet or wardrobe a delightful faint odor of violet. If you use delicate soap with a sweet clean perfume, not of musk or anything strong and pronounced, and put a few drops of alcohol or ammonia in the water when you bathe, you need not be afraid of any unfavorable comment on your daintiness. Perfect cleanliness is always dainty. Soil and stain, dust and dirt, are never anything but repulsive.
Rose-leaves pulled from the perfect flower and laid in your box of note-paper when they are fresh will dry there, and insure your sending to your friends notes which will associate you with fragrance. There is an exquisite perfume in dried roses.
How do you seal your letters, by-the-way? I hope you have at hand a bit of sponge and a tiny glass of water with which to moisten the mucilage on the flap of your envelope. Better still is a little glass cylinder in a glass jar, a very ornamental and thoroughly clean affair, which can be procured at any stationer's. The glass jar holds water. You turn the cylinder, and on its wet surface place your envelope. Postage stamps may be moistened in the same way.
When friends call, on these very sultry days, you offer them fans, do you not, and, if they wish it, a glass of cold water or lemonade? Palm-leaf or Japanese fans should be in every room in profusion during the summer solstice. When fans are broken at the edges renew them by a ribbon binding, and tie a jaunty bow on the handle. Very few things should be thrown aside as useless. While an article can be mended or renovated it is worth keeping, and a thrifty person never discards a household implement of any kind until she is convinced that it is worn out.
Ribbon plays an important part in decoration. A bow on the corner of mamma's sewing-chair, on the dressing-glass which hangs over the table, on the little birthday package you send your friend, gives each a sort of gala look. The plainest furniture in the plainest bedroom may be brightened and made attractive by good taste, a few yards of cheap netting or lace, and the judicious use of ribbon. Clever fingers can accomplish wonders with very little money.
A girl showed me one day a beautiful sewing-chair, white and gold as to frame-work, and cushioned with a lovely chintz, a white ground thickly sprinkled with daisies.
"There!" she said. "Mamma gave me permission to use anything I could find in our attic, and I hunted around till I came across this chair. Such a fright! It was dingy and broken, and fit for nothing but firewood. Look at it now. Two coats of white paint, some gilding, and this lovely cushion, and then this ravishing frill and box of yellow satin ribbon! Isn't it a triumph?"
I said, very sincerely, that I thought it was.
Bertha wishes me to tell her why lemonade is not always the rich refreshing drink it should be. Well, Bertha, everybody does not know how to make lemonade. I squeeze my lemons in a glass lemon-squeezer, mix in my granulated sugar with a lavish hand, and add the thinly pared rind of a lemon, dropping it in in circular strips. On this I pour boiling water, setting it by to cool, and, when cold, putting it away in the refrigerator. Then when served I add a strawberry, or a bit of sliced orange or banana, and some pounded ice, and the lemonade is delicious.