A GARMENT FOR BEAUTY. 
189 
For silk is a noble and in nowise pretentious attire, which lends a 
subdued charm to the exuberant liveliness of youth, and clothes declin¬ 
ing beauty with its most tender and touching radiance. 
A genuine mystery attends it which is not without attraction. 
Colour or gloss? Cotton has its peculiar gloss, and, when fitly pre¬ 
pared, often acquires an agreeable freshness. Silk is not properly 
glossy, but luminous,—with a soft electrical light, which harmonizes 
naturally with the electricity of the woman. A living tissue, it em¬ 
braces willingly the living person. 
Oriental ladies, before they foolishly adopted our Western customs,, 
wore but two kinds of stuff: underneath, the real cashmere (of so fine 
a texture that a large shawl might be passed through a finger-ring);, 
and above, a beautiful tunic of silk of a pale blonde, or rather straw 
colour, with a gleam or flash of magnetic amber. 
These two articles were less garments than friends,—gentle slaves,. 
—supple and charming flatterers: the cashmere warm, caressing, and 
pliant, enfolding the bather lovingly when she emerged from her bath; 
the silk tunic, on the contrary, light and aerial, only not too diaphanous. 
Its blonde whiteness agreed most admirably with the colour of her skin; 
one might indeed have very justly said that it had imbibed that colour 
through its constant intimacy and accustomed tenderness. Inferior to 
the skin, undoubtedly, yet it seemed related to it; or rather it became in 
the end a part of the body, and, as it were, melted into it, like a dream 
which informs our whole existence, and cannot be separated from it. 
