Dear Sir,–Oh! These Jeremiahs, these wiseacres, they are like the poor, always with us. If we do this, or refrain from doing that, or advocate the other whatever it may be, pray pause. Have you considered the effect it will have on your nose, or your liver, or your toes? Do, please, be careful! Did you ever know a doctor who took his own prescriptions? Have you noticed that they eat anything other than what everybody else does?
Are these reformers dressed differently to the rest of us? I don’t think so. And if all their prognostications came true, wouldn’t the world be almost depopulated? Yet there are a fair proportion of old ladies in the world who ought to have died horrible deaths years ago – the wiseacres said so – because they tight-laced when they were young and did all the thing the Jeremiahs said they must not do.
Have you ever seen a parade of nurses? They are about the only people who aren’t afraid of showing waist to-day. Yet I don’t hear these wiseacres condemning their uniforms on unhygienic grounds.
Do let us be reasonable, and if we like to wear our clothing to suit ourselves – well, please don’t lecture us, and we have different preferences in the matter and manner of wearing clothes, while there are very wide limits within which we can move without being dubbed eccentric.
Personally, I have always tight-laced myself, because I prefer the feel of a close-fitting corset to a loose corset. I have tried both, and have appreciated the distinction.
I have yet to know what a serious illness is and until these Dsmal Jimmies can prove to my satisfaction that I am on my way to the cemetery, I shall continue to lace myself in – not to twelve or fourteen inches – I regard those tales as apochryphal; but to my own satisfaction and, I trust, to the discomfiture of the prophet of woe aforesaid,
Yours truly, H.D.