Christina came on to us for a few days after staying with her mother-in-law, and brought her sewing-machine, The Little Wanzer, and taught Ariadne and me to manage that wretched tension of which one hears so much. She nearly lockstitched one of my ears to the table, as I was learning with all my might, but it was worth it, and to Ariadne it was an advent. Up to now, she has always thought she looked very nice in her bags with holes in them for the arms, and her twenty necklaces on at once, and her undescribable colours. Beautiful colours never seem to look quite clean, do you know? It is all very well for George, he is an author and not young, but young men like you to look fresh, and well-groomed, and above all to have a waist. Now a waist is not even allowed to be mentioned in our house. Mother left off hers, and her ear-rings too, at George's request, when she married him, and as she never goes anywhere, she does not feel the want of them, but even when Ariadne was seventeen, Elizabeth Cawthorne said that it was time that she began to see about making herself a waist, and although George laughed Ariadne to death about it when she told him what the cook had said, yet it sank in, and I used to wake up in the grey winter mornings and find Ariadne sitting up in bed like a new sort of Penelope taking tucks in her stays, which Mother made her take out again in the daytime, knowing how George would disapprove of it. Ariadne managed to "sneak" a waist, and George never noticed. That is the odd part of it; we all think that that inch more or less makes such a difference, and we may be panting with uncomfortableness all the time, and to the outward eye look as thick as ever! Ariadne's figure is not her best point. Her hair is. It is well to find out one's best points early in life and stick to them, as they say of friends. Ariadne trains hers day and night in the way it should go, but doesn't want. I wonder it stands it, and doesn't come out in self-defence! It is what they call Burne-Jones hair, like cocoanut fibre, _I_ think, but Papa's friends admire it, and she gets the reputation of being a beauty on it in our set. But in Lady Scilly's set, that is Simon's set more or less, they think her a pretty girl, badly turned out!