make a pleasing impression, while now she gets snubbed in a tacit way, and those who take her up out of pity hardly feel as if they were paid for it. If women with hay-colored hair could be brought to believe that light brown, of all others, wasn’t the color for their style, one could afford to overlook minor deficiencies. One is tempted to think sometimes that there is a loss in not adopting the French plan of lining houses with mirrors. If people continually caught sight of themselves, they would hardly indulge in the grimaces and gaucheries which they inflict on the world. It could hardly lead to vanity in most cases, and would settle many vexing problems of dress and demeanor. One is not always to be censured for studying the glass. The orator must use it to learn how to deliver his sentences with proper facial play and easy gesture. The public singer studies with a mirror on the music-rack to get the right position of the mouth for issuing the voice without making a face. The want of such training mars the work of some great artists with blemishes which nearly undo the effect of their talents. The injunction that all things should be done decently and in order means that they ought to be pleasing. The study of ourselves can hardly be complete without the aid of the mirror, which shows candidly the cold smile, the vacant, bashful gaze, we give our fellow-beings, instead of the decent attention, the kind, full glance it is meet they should have from us, and which we prefer to receive from them. It shows the frown, the sour melancholy, which creep over the face in reveries, and leads us to try and feel pleasant that we may look so. How much confidence one assuring glance at a mirror has given us in going to receive a visitor, and what kindly warning of what was amiss in expression or toilet before it was too late! Is our vanity so easily excited that we are ready to fall in love with ourselves at sight? The intimate acquaintance with our appearance which the glass can give is more likely to make one genuinely humble. In a world which owns among its maxims the gay and wicked refrain of “manners for us, morals for those who like them,” good people can not afford to neglect either their toilets or their mirrors. CHAPTER XXII. Physical Education of Girls.--A Woman’s Value in the World.--High-bred Figures.--Antique Races.--Inspiration of Art not Vanity.--The Trying Age.--Dress, Food, and Bathing for Young Girls.--A Veto on Close Study.--Braces and Backboards.--Never Talk of Girls’ Feelings.--Exercise for the Arms.--Singing Scales with Corsets off.--Development of the Bust.--Open-work Corsets the Best.--The Bayaderes of India and their Forms.--The Delicacy due Young Girls.--A Frank but Needed Caution.--Care of the Figure after Nursing.