WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
have blue eyes and fair complexions, and their forms are exquisite. Their native costumes are perhaps unattractive to Western eyes. They are clad in baggy trousers of white staff, and a sort of dark coat that reaches from the neck almost to the ankles. A gaudy shawl is twisted about the body around the waist and loins. Their plentiful hair falls in long, thick plaits. Upon the head they wear a gauze veil.
Bodenstedt, a poet and an accredited critic of womanly beauty, declares that the Georgians are a very handsome race, but he does not consider that the women excel the men in beauty. The women's faces seemed to this writer lacking in intelligence and refinement. "In a Georgian everything fades with youth. The eyes, which, notwithstanding their apparent fire, never expressed anything but calm and voluptuous indolence, lose their lustre; the nose, which even in its normal relations exceeds the limits of beauty, assumes, in consequence of the premature hollowness of the cheeks, such abnormal dimensions that many people imagine that it actually continues to grow; and the bosom, which the national costume makes no effort to conceal, prematurely loses its natural firmness—all of which phenomena are observed in European women much less frequently, and in a less exaggerated form. If you add to this the habit, so prevalent among Georgians, young and old, of using white and red
185
