WHY WOMEN FADE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XI, Issue 43, 28 October 1893, Page 358

WHY WOMEN FADE.

PRACTICAL HINTS TO ENABLE THEM TO RETAIN THEIR BEAUTY.

THE EVIL BEGINS AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE, IS CONTINUED AT SCHOOL, AND WORRIMENT BRINGS THE REST. The life of any ordinary woman from fifteen to thirty has no possible chance for the storing of strength, which is the essential for liveliness and attraction. It is a paying out of vitality as fast as it can be made, a tasking and taxing of ill-fed nerves, stinted of air, sunshine, rest, and healthy stimulus. A schoolgirl rises to an eight o'clock breakfast or later. The sun has been shining three hours and the air is at its freshest, but she has no thought for a run out of doors, which would tone her for the day. She was up till eleven the night before, as most girls of fourteen are, at some trifling entertainment or merely sitting round, chatting with chance comers. A mother who wished to insure her health and good looks would insist that the child should be in bed as soon after nine each night as possible, allowing only one night out a week until she was eighteen. I may as well stop here and close my suggestions, for the outcry of mothers and daughters against early sleep is general and overpowering. There is little use to talk about women’s fading, for few of them have freshness any longer, but are weazened and thin at thirteen, what with too many schoolbooks, and grown-up hours and habits generally. Of course they fade. FOOD. Oatmeal, especially of the finer sorts in which the housekeeper delights, often passes digestion in a crude shape as masses of starch, which clog the body without nourishing it. Dry, crisp oatcake is much better than boiled oatmeal, and is far more palatable, its oil and starch being changed in baking. Clean, cracked wheat is the food for nervous, studious, or housekeeping women and children, containing as it does the phosphates needed and the coarse character which aids the organs in their work. The fine flours and foods of the day are one great cause of the early deterioration of the race. If we wished artfully to eliminate every particle of nutrition from food, it would only be necessary to carry the process of grinding, bolting and refining a little further. WOMEN HALF STARVED. In my own experience and that of the most intelligent literary people met it is not possible to change from sqund, coarse food containing all the wheat for one day without loss of strength and nervous tone, while the difference in complexion in a single month challenge admiration from all the women about. The men don't say anything, bnt they notice it all the same. I know that ordinary women scout and cavil at this doctrine. They will have it that their mothers were strong and good looking on white bread and fried potatoes and steak, and it is all nonsense to fuss so much about cracked wheat and coarse bread when they are just as well without it. They send to the bakers for bread five days in seven and put their oatmeal to cook for the breakfast opening course, to be swilled down—there is no other word—with milk and sugar just before the beefsteak or the ham and eggs. Oatmeal paste, half cooked, city milk and sugar ! Why not serve ice cream before the meats? Let the wheat, carefully cooked the night before, be served with the juicy steak. The general habit of flooding the stomach with milk and sweets arrests digestion at once and impairs the value of the food taken after. All these things tend to early drooping and decay of the human flower. Our women are half starved, to tell the truth. SMALL TROUBLES EXAGGERATED. Minds make their own opportunities. Where one woman moans that she has no time for mental culture another, equally burdened, makes her chance, cuts a slip from a newspaper and pins it where she can read while ironing or washing dishes, and repeats poetry or proverbs to herself while going about the bouse, counting it no injury to her family if she takes ten minutes a day in this manner to keep her soul alive and growing. For the beet and deepest cultivation and education is gained in this way, little by little, wrought into the memory and worked over in thought till it is part of the lonely student's being. • I am too grieved and worried to think or read when I ha\ e time to sit down with baby,' says one woman. • I never could have borne what I had to if I had not read and thought of other things when I rocked the baby or pared the apples,’ says another ; and it simply shows the difference in the souls of people. Women of a fine quality

of intellect will live through troubles and distresses which send ordinary women insane, and come out looking younger than their sisters who have been petted and sheltered all their lives.

But certain women follow closely the example of the old lady on her death-bed, who, reminded that she had led an easy life, whined out that ‘ she had always made the most of her small troubles.’ Few women overlook a chance to be worried, and as for ignoring a slight or offence, or failing to be worked up and wounded by it to the highest degree, it would seem flying in the face of Providence, accoiding to their ideas.