described to me as a full-undress party, and as I entered and beheld
many of the other sex, I was struck by the accuracy of the
description. As I promenaded through the brilliant throng with one of
the loveliest of your young persons of that sex, she said to me, with
a bewitching smile, 'Dear Mr. Altangi, is it true that Chinese women
squeeze their feet for beauty? How very funny!'

"She panted as she spoke, and I saw that her body was evidently
incased in some kind of rigid and unyielding garment, and that her
waist was surely not the waist of nature. I gazed as intently as
decorum would permit--for I am but a student of cities and of men--and
I was sure that my lovely companion's body was more cruelly compressed
than the feet of my adorable countrywomen, and her panting breath was
but evidence of the justice of my observation. I asked her with
sympathy if I could not call some companion to relieve her, or, if the
case were urgent, whether I could not myself offer succor. But she
gazed at me as if I spoke a strange language, and smilingly asked my
meaning.

"'Dear miss,' I said, 'are you not in great suffering?' 'Not at all,'
she replied, and I paid homage to her heroism. 'I know not, dear miss,
whether to admire more the greatness of your heroism or the generosity
of your sympathy. While you are in torment yourself, your tender
interest goes forth to my countrywomen in what you believe to be
torture. Be comforted, dear miss; the anguish of a squeezed foot is
not comparable to that of a waist so cruelly confined as yours, and
the consequences, also, are not to be compared.' If human bodies in
your great and happy country are made like ours in China, certainly,
Mr. Easy Chair, I must acknowledge that in heroic endurance of the
cruelty of fashion your country is indeed pre-eminent."