THE “BULGY” LADY

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1628, 13 May 1903, Page 24

THE “BULGY” LADY

“I Avish I Avas a Turkish lady or a Chinese damsel,” Availed Margy, and her mother’s shocked, “Why. girlie?” did not make her look a bit sorry. Margy is plump, says The Young Man, who thinks that she would be adorable whether “toothpicky” or “mealbaggy,” so long as she Avas just Margy, but girl friends Avho are not blinded by Margy’s blue eyes and ha\*e time to notice tight seams and double chins declare that - if she doesn’t diet she Avill be out and out stout.

“I think it is perfectly horrid the way people act,” went on the little girl, sorrowfully eating a x>icce of chocolate layer cake. ‘You would think that being inclined to —well,- plumpness, was the biggest crime a girl could commit. Every tunc anyone who hasn’t seen me fer a" few days meets me, they exclaim, ‘Why. Margy Brown, how fat you are getting! Why don’t you take more exercise?’ Just as if I didn’t walk a whole lot and dust the parlour and play ping pong. Of course, I suppose if I settled right down to it and starved myself I might get to be as skinny _as Mary, but no thanks, I’d rather enjoy myself, even if I do get fat. It’s my own funeral, anyhow,” sho concluded with a burst of truly regrettable slang. The stout lady is receiving very little sympathy nowadays. Once upon a timo tiie lady who strained at her moorings, or rather her seams, and got a colour at tlio slightest provocation, was pitied, and her friends all said: “Poor girl! Sho is taking after her mother! \ou know that family aro all so stout.” But embonpoint is looked rupon as a great but wholly unnecessary evil in these modern days, and she who possesses it is advised until her ears loathe the sound, to “go to the gymnasium and learn of the trainer how to be willowy.” Twenty years ago, when a woman reached the age of forty-five, she was usually in a pitiful state, so far as her form was concerned. She bulged where she ought not to, ‘ and "was flat where she should have bulged. If she was vain and did not relish being a caricature of the form divine, she wore a, tight corset and laced so that she looked worse than ever, and felt worse than she looked. But to-day she lies down on the floor and kicks up her feet, learns to do all sorts of impossible things, gets into gym clothes and does, stunts and cold baths every morning, and. when slio is dressed an seen on the street she looks like her own eldest daughter, and has a figure that no girl need be ashamed of. What cue woman can do another may accomplish, so the stout lady, who bemoans the fact that acquaintances are too zealous m her behalf, should remember that a fat lady is never as agreeable a sight as her skinny sister, and she therefore owes ro to the community to exercise and lose some of the flesh that aniiovs.