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You may think that this only applies to frivolous and silly women, but you are wrong. It applied even to goddesses! Historians inform us that the haughty Juno, discovering that her husband, Jupiter, was going the way of all flesh and nearly every husband, borrowed her girdle from Venus, with the result that when Jupiter returned home that evening from business, he stayed with his wife–the club calling him in vain. Thus was Juno justified of her “tightness.”

But then, many a wife has cause to look upon a well-cut corset as her best friend. And many a husband, too, has every reason to be grateful to that article of his wife’s apparel which the vulgar will call “stays.” In earlier days a husband used to lock his wife in a pair of iron-bound corsets when he went away from home, keeping the key in his pocket, and thus not caring a tinker’s cuss if his home were simply overflowing with handsome gentleman lodgers! The poor wife couldn’t retaliate by locking her husband in such a virtuous prison, because men never wore such things–which, perhaps, was one or the reasons why they didn’t, who knows?

Also, the corset–or rather, the “bulge” of middle-age, which was the real cause of their ever being worn–has always strongly influenced the fashions. I don’t know it as a positive fact, though I suspect it to be true nevertheless, that the woman of fashion who first discovered that no amount of iron bars could keep her from bulging in the right place, but to the wrong extent, suddenly, thought of the pannier and the crinoline and–well, that’s where she found that she was laughing. For almost any woman can make her waist-line small: her trouble only really comes when she has to tackle other parts of her anatomy which begin to show the thickening of Anno Domini. Panniers and the crinoline save her an enormous amount of mental agony. On the principle of “What the eye doesn’t see, to the imagination looks beautiful”–the early Victorian lady was wise in her generation, and her modern sister, who shows the world most things without considering whether what she exhibits is worth looking at, is an extremely foolish person. One thing, however, which women have never been able to fix definitely, is exactly where her waist should be. Men know where it is, and they put their arms round it instinctively whenever they get the chance. But women change their mind about it every few years. Sometimes it is down-down-down, and sometimes it is under their armpits. A few years ago a woman who had what is known as a “short waist” was referred to by other women as a “Poor Thing.” Then the short-waisted woman came into fashion–or rather, fashions fashioned themselves for her benefit–and her long-waisted sister had to struggle to make her waist look to be where really her ribs were. Only a few weeks back a woman’s waist and bust and hips had all to be definitely defined. Nowadays they bundle them all, as it were, into clothes cut in a sack-line, and are the very last letter of the very latest word in fashion. I can well imagine that a few years hence women will be as severely corseted as they were a short time ago.

I can well remember the time when a woman who held “views” and discarded her stays sent a shudder through the man who was forced to dance with her–though whether they were pleasurable shudders or merely shuddery shudders I do not know. Nowadays, the woman who wears an out-and-out corset, tightly laced, is either a publican’s wife or is just bursting with middle age. The corset of to-day is little more than the original plaited grass originated by Mother Eve–in width, that is; in texture it is of a luxury unimaginable in the Garden of Eden.

Women are not so concerned nowadays that their waist should be the eighteen inches of 1890 beauty as that their figure elsewhere should not presume their condition to be at once national and domestic. The modern corset starts soon and finishes quite early. Thus the cycle from Mother Eve is now complete. “As we were” has once more repeated itself.

The only novelty which belongs to to-day is that men are wearing corsets more than ever. A well-known corsetiere has opened a special branch for her male customers alone. Their corsets, too, are of a most beautiful and elaborate description–ranging from the plain belt of the famous athlete to the brocade, rosebud-embroidered “confection” of a well-known general. Perhaps–say fifty years hence–my grandson will be writing of male lingerie, and men will rather lose their reputations than lose their figure. Well, well! if we live in a topsy-turvy world–as they say we do–let’s all be topsy-turvy!