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Show lack-gracefulness or choking steel frames and tight lacings. Perhaps, after all, the normal waist Is one concerning; which Nature proposes pro-poses and Fashion has no audacity to dispone. "THE NORMAL WAIST." New York World: Among the fash-Ion fash-Ion notes of the early year "there is talk," says one gentle editor, "of the restoration of 'the normal waistline.' waist-line.' " It is an Hem perhaps or promise, prom-ise, perhaps not. If fashion could bo depended upon to mean Just what it says but when it speaks of "the normal waist-line" what does it mean? When it comes to the pinch, the figure fig-ure of waiat measurement can lie as bravely as any other statistics. In the run of the inches, from eighteen even to thirty-six, is vast range lor the abnormal. This 13 a matter in which mere man has some right which fashion should be bound to respect. The waist of woman offers an intimate question In J aesthetics. It may present a tender not necessarily slender circle of fascination, a gross round of repulsion, repul-sion, a contracted suggestion of corseted cor-seted torture, or the humorously generous gen-erous linos that predicate good living unruffled of vanity. We may remember remem-ber here that aunt forgetting If she was jovial In proportion to her proportions pro-portions of whom Dr. Holmes wrote that "Her wal6t Is ampler than her life, For llfo is bat a span. But what is the normal? Is it not, the lover may ask, a waist that tapers to the measure of the right man's arms? Poets have decided that way before now, yet have not been ali-wUe. ali-wUe. It is one of artistic sense who has written of the Venus de Medici, miniature but beautiful, that "the lines flow Into each other as sottly and delicately as if the winds of summer sum-mer had moulded the frame." No tapering here, at least by artifice; no |