Rensselaer Republican, Volume 13, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 April 1881 — The Downward Glance. [ARTICLE]

The Downward Glance.

1 have often had occasion, says a correspondent, to instruct my readers that fashion stops not at prescribing what clothes women shall wear, but goes on to dictate changes of style in manners aud customs. The demeanor of fashionable women is subject to radical alterations season to season. Sometimes the pattern is set by some women conspicuous in the world of society; the mannerisms of a favorite actress or the singers are uot infrequently caught up by the heroine of a popular novel is often perceptibley aped; but some of the freaks of deportment can not be traced to their sources, and we only know, all of a sudden, that they have come iuto fashion. A year ago, for instance, it was right for a girl to gaze squarely and unfinchingly right into the eyes of the man with whom she was conversing, and many a poor diffident chap has been frightened almost out of his boots by the ordeal to which a pair of deep, dark orbs subjected him. At the present time little of that habit is seen, and it is right for a girl to shyly drop her eyelids, never fairly meeting the look of the man who is with her in a dialogue. Who would undertake to tell what has brought about this variation in the use of eyes? The steady gazer was then considered delightfully frank; now she would be pronounced bold, if not brazen.