LADIES COLUMN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 9455, 10 March 1894, Page 4 (Supplement)

LADIES COLUMN.

SOME CREATIONS" IN MILLINERY. The Palais de Glace, formerly known as tne Cirque d'Ete, is a fashionable resort of tne Parisians, who skate there on real ice produced by chemical means. The Paris correspondent of Truth describes some of the wonderful costumes there to be seen :— " Jeann«t Darlaud hastens nightly from the theatre where she plays to the Palais do Glace. She comes in one of heritage cos« tumes when she plays in a modern genteel comedy. Some of her fair frionds must have suffered cruelly in gazing a few evenings ago at her dog-collar of peerless Orienb pearls, and her long diamond and pearlstudded chain that festooned the front of her low corsage, of which, the mantle being loosely worn, a vista was afforded. They possibly were made still more uncomfortable by the lithe grace with which she wore that garment and a Marie Louise dress. A butterfly of monstrous size, and in sapphires and brilliants, was perched on another butterfly in old lace, and both were fastened on a small blue velvet hab of the First Empire style. Irma, the songstress, who might servo as an understudy for Yvette Guilbert, was in a black longwaisted amaranth velvet dress, bub so arranged in front as to appear in the freshest Empire fashion. This was managed by two wide jewelled bands, starting from the seam beneath the arms, and fastened in front with a deep buckle of either brilliants or paste that had as much fire as reffl stones. From the demi-girdle hung a thickly-gathered and long, loose tablier of electric-blue and soft silk gauze. ■ A deep trimming of ostrich feather swept round the skirt. The mantle, also open, was long, and of white brocade, and bordered round the neck and down the front with the silky fur of the Thibet goat. Jeanne Gamier was a diabless in black and crimson. The cornes du diable feathers for bonnets had to a great, extent yielded to Alsatian bows, which the bonnet of the Comtesse de Pourtales ab the wedding of her last son has made f;ishionable. Black and mauve dresses are at a disadvantage at the Palace de Glace in the gallery, the background being there formed of landscapes, in which the cobalt blue of the Mediterranean sea and sky predominate. The white and the pale yellow and the delicate pink costumes or trimmings looked best. Black-oyed stage beauties generally had fair hair, and blue-eyed black hair.

THE REVOLT OF THE DAUGHTERS.

An article which recently appeared in the Nineteenth Century from the pen of Mrs. Crackanthorpe has created a great deal of interest and discussion. Mrs. Crackanthorpe devotes her attention to the seriqps differences which she says exist in fashionable families between mothers and daughters : — When an habitue, of London society, says Mrs. Crackanthorpe, himself a keen observer of manners, is heard to remark that this question must be ripe, seeing the very large percentage of households where war, open or concealed, exists between mothers and daughters, it is serious. When a leading London doctor confides to a friend that ho is much concerned oy a new phenomenon in his practice—to wit, the frequent presence in his waitingroom of mothers broken down in body and perplexed in mind over " difficulties" with their grown-up daughters, ami of daughters come to consult him privately whose nerves have " gone wrong, 1 ' because, as they put their case, they are not " understood" or "sympathised with" by their mothers, this is significant indeed. The evil cannot be lightly laughed away as a passing trouble, to be speedily cured by marriage in the one case, and in the other—where the mother's inappropriate youthfulnesy is a chier disturbing cause—by the certain grip of relentless old age. While admitting to the full the provocative nature, the egotism, the governing unreasonableness, which too. oftun characterise the attitude of the daughters during the struggle for supremacy ; everything, in fact, which goes to form that expressive yeb inelegant word tiresome, we yet find ourselves ranged 011 the side of the younger generation. They are young. They are vital. The springs of life, the thirst to taste its joys, run verj strong in their veins They desire ardently to try things on their own account. They long for the " unexpected," not always the "properly introduced," still less the " well accredited" of that sage and prudent ambassador, their mother. Far from them is the desire for things that are wrong in themselves. They have no unwholesome hankering for forbidden fruit. Their individuality is at this moment the strongest— and the most inconvenient —thing abouu them. They pray passionately to be allowed to travel ever so short a way alono. Can it bo denied that mothers are oftentimes mortally stupid ? Let mothers— especially " good" mothers—practise a. secret the art of contemplating their daughters as part of a vast "collective • youth, and not as highly specialised young females on whom no wind is to blow roughly, whose ears are to be stuffed with medicated cotton-wool, and whose sight i«; to be ever safeguarded by substantial blinkers well tied on by the prudent parent. Girls want to make their own minor mistakes, and nob to bo strictly limited by unwritten law to producing feeble imitations of their mothers' beat copies. And why not, since mistakes havo to be made? No one is worth u thought who has not made them, and he or sue who has lost the capacity for their manufacture, as an occasional indulgence, is iar on toj wards old age. We are not writing of girls in their teens, but of women burned 20. i With sons this course has to be taken, as every mother of sons knows. Her bestloved son mast have his Wandtrjahr Why not allow the possibility that nice girls, well-disposed girls, may also desiru a mild sorb of Wanderjahre, period, during which they, too, want not to break fences, but to get occasional glimpses of the landscape beyond the family domain ? Blunders not a few they may make, bub nob of the kind that need be counted with. The far-seeing mother will consent to sit a quiet and smiling spectator when her daughter ventures on small, or even comparatively big, social experiments. She will not employ her leisure moments in crushing every troublesome symptom of individuality., nor in flab-ironing the surface creases thab may from time to time appear. She will be slow to blame and quick to praise.

JEWELS AND HEAT. There is an ancienb and honourable anecdote in which a gaily-clad woman in evening dress, complaining of cold, is advised by an elderly Quaker to '* put on another breast-pin." There seems to bo enduring fun in the idea of the warmth ot jewellery. As a matter of fact, jewellery properly disposed raises the temperature perceptibly. The slight friction of a necklace keeps the throat warm. A diamond necklace or a strand of pearls may ward oft' bronchitis or laryngitis. Children who used to wear coral beads have been known to catch cold when these were taken off. Bracelets keep the wrists warm. Every woman accustomed to wearing bracelets knows how cold her wrists feel when these are removed. The handsomer the bracelet the warmer she feels. A Philadelphia woman, who has studied the wearing of jewellery as a hygienic measure, says that the entire circulation may be raised or lowered by wearing the proper jewellery ati the wrist. She has pulse-coolers for summer and pulse-warmers ' for winter. Her pulse-coolers are spheroids of rose crystals,- linked together with filigree silver. The pulse-warmers are strips of asbestos, which ii a non-conductor, enveloped in embossed velvet) and fastened with diamond buckles.

THE WAYS OF YOUNG MEN. "They don't fall in love as frankly, as honestly, as irretrievably as they used to do. They shilly-shally, they pick and choose, they discuss, they criticise." That is Mr. Grant Allen's opinion of the young men of the presenb day. Well, a certain amount of hesitation is pardonable before entering upon a state out of which there are only two ways, and both unpleasant. Bub the trouble is not bo much that men pick and choose as that they do not choose at all. They are indifferent; they do nob marry. Mr. Granb Allen says that it is due to the " cumulative effect of nervous overexcitement." It is an age in which there is no leisure. Bub the presenb age has always been wrong and always will be monj^