to fasten her dress without refastening her other garments. This she will be unable to do if the stays over which it was made were too tight; for the chest, having been for once properly expanded, will not readily return to its former cramped state.
If women who have worn stays all their lives wisely elect to give them up they must do so gradually, for they would suffer from the sudden change, as I have already indicated. At first thinner busks should be substituted for those in use, then after a week or two some of the bones should be removed, and so on until all the support in the stays is taken away. After this the muscles will have adapted themselves to the gradual change and have come to rely upon themselves for support, and then the stays may be exchanged for the bodice I shall describe in the next chapter. While condemning tight-lacing and giving the reasons for this condemnation, I have been careful not in any way to condemn the use of the corset as such; as I have observed, women may lace tightly without wearing stays, and, on the other hand, they may wear stays without lacing tightly.
The abuse of the corset is at present, unfortunately, rampant in England, and every day in society we see sights shocking to the eye of the artist and of the sanitarian. It is no rare thing to meet ladies so tightly laced that they positively cannot lean back in a chair or on a sofa, for if they did they would suffocate. I know many a girl who can hardly dance because the agony which exercise causes her in the cramped state of her
