accustomed: now turn to the costume that you wear, and which you are in
a manner compelled to wear; for I am not so visionary as to expect
a woman, or even a man under sixty, to fly directly in the face of
fashion, although her extravagant caprices may be gracefully disregarded
by both sexes and all ages. Here are two fashion-plates of the last
month,--[Footnote: March, 1869.] not magazine caricatures, mind you, or
anything like it,--but from the first _modistes_ in Paris. Look at that
shawled lady, with her back toward us. If you did not know that that is
a shawl, and that the thing which surmounts it is a bonnet, you would
not suspect the figure to be human. See; there is a slightly undulating
slope at an angle of about sixty-five degrees from the crown of the head
to the lowest hem of the skirt, so that the outline is that of a pyramid
slightly rounded at the apex, and nearly as broad across the base as
it is high. What is there of woman in such a figure? And this
evening-dress; it suggests the enchantments in the stories of the Dark
Ages, where knights encounter women who are women to the breasts and
monsters below. From the head to as far as halfway down the waist, this
figure is natural.

_Mr. Key._ Under the circumstances it could hardly be otherwise. _Au
naturel_, I should call it, except for the spice of a few flowers and a
little lace.

_Grey_. But from that point it begins to lose its semblance to a woman's
shape, (as you will see by raising your eyes again to the Venus,) and
after running two or three inches decidedly inward in a straight line,
where it should turn outward with a gentle curve, its outlines break
into a sharp angle, and it expands, with a sudden hyperbolical curve,
into a monstrous and nameless figure that is not only unlike Nature, but
has no relations whatever with Nature. The eye needs no cultivation,