NORA says – “I venture to trouble you with a few particulars on the subject of ‘tight-lacing’, having seen a letter in your March number inviting correspondence on the matter. I was placed at the age of fifteen at a fashionable school in London, and there it was the custom for the waists of the pupils to be reduced one inch per month until they were what the lady principal considered small enough. When I left school at seventeen, my waist measured only thirteen inches, it having been formerly twenty-three inches in circumference. Every morning one of the maids used to come to assist us to dress, and a governess superintended, to see that our corsets were drawn as tight as possible. After the first few minutes every morning, I felt no pain, and the only ill effects apparently were occasional headaches and loss of appetite. I should be glad if you will inform me if it is possible for girls to have a waist of fashionable size and yet preserve their health. Very few of my fellow pupils appeared to suffer, except the pain caused by the extreme tightness of the stays. In one case, where the girls was stout and largely built, two strong maids were obliged to use their utmost force to make her waist the size ordered by the lady principal – viz., 17 inches; and though she fainted twice while the stays were being made to meet, she wore them without seeming injury to her health, and before she left school, she had a waist measuring only 14 inches, yet she never suffered a day’s illness. Generally, all the blame is laid by parents on the principal of the school, but it is often a subject of the greatest rivalry among the girls to see which can get the smallest waist, and often while the servant was drawing in the waist of my friend to the utmost of her strength, the young lady, though being tightened till, she had hardly breathe to speak, would urge the maid to pull the stays yet closer, and tell her not to let lace slips in the least. I think this is a subject which is not sufficiently understood. Though I have always heard tight-lacing condemned, I have never suffered any ill effects myself and, as a rule, our school was singularly free from illness. By publishing this side of the question in the ENGLISHWOMAN’S DOMESTIC MAGAZINE you will greatly oblige.”