a spirit of imitation which has achieved a
degrading success.

"Our modest matrons meet," not "to stare the strumpet down," but to
compare notes, to get hints, and to engage in a kind of friendly
rivalry--in short, to pay that homage to Vice, and in a very direct way
too, which Vice is said formerly to have paid to Virtue. Paint and
powder are of course the first requisites for the end in view, and these
adjuncts have to be laid on with such skill as the _debutante_ or her
toilette-maid possesses, which is sometimes so small as to leave their
handiwork disgustingly coarse and apparent.

There are pearl-powder, violet-powder, rouge, bistre for the eyelids,
belladonna for the eyes, whitelead and blacklead, yellow dye and mineral
acids for the hair--all tending to the utter destruction of both hair
and skin. The effect of this "diaphanous" complexion and "aurified" hair
(we borrow the expressions) in a person intended by nature to be dark,
or swarthy, is most comical; sometimes the whitelead is used so
unsparingly that it has quite a blue tint, which glistens until the face
looks more like a death's head anointed with phosphorus and oil for
theatrical purposes than the head of a Christian gentlewoman. It may be
interesting to know, and we have the information from high, because
_soi-disant_ fashionable authority, that the reign of golden locks and
blue-white visages is drawing to a close, and that it is to be followed
by bronze complexions and blue-black hair--_a l'Africaine_ we presume.

When fashionable Madame has, to her own satisfaction, painted and
varnished her face, she then proceeds, like Jezebel, to tire her head,
and, whether she has much hair or little, she fixes on to the back of it
a huge nest of coarse hair generally well baked in order to free it from
the parasites with which it abounded when it first adorned the person of
some Russian or North-German peasant girl. Of course this gives an
unnaturally large and heavy appearance to the cerebellar region; but
nature is not exactly what is aimed at, still less refinement.

If this style be not approved of, there is yet another fashion--namely,
to cut the hair short in a crop, _creper_ it, curl it, frizzle it,
bleach it, burn it, and otherwise torture it until it has about as much
life in it as last year's hay; and then to shampoo it, rumple it, and
tousle it, until the effect is to produce the aspect of a madwoman in
one of her worst fits. This method, less t