Young Japan in New York "Tt is time for us Japanese women to become selfish.'
"The speaker was carefully adjusting her veil at a large mirror in the dressing-room of a fashionable New York club. Her hostess made some rapid psychological deductions, and, ignoring the remark, said feebly: How becoming your veil is!" Yes, answered the Japanese lady, gravely, 'I am ways very careful to choose my veil. I find that these small velvet. spots look pretty against the pink of my Tue Javaxese Women.
"Only those women of limited means who have chased perfection through the giant department stores of Fifth Avenue can appreciate fully te strength of purpose in this stranger from the Far East," writes Mrs. Robertson Scott in "Time and Tide, 'Six months before she had never worn a hat, and knew nothing of veils. Now, her gown was a perfect match with the stockings that merged harmoniously with the tone of her beautifully cut beaver shoes. And who may guess how many suits' she must have rejected until she found one with such becoming length of line that it cleverly disguised the stocky habit of the Japanese female form in Western dress, Yet the saleswoman of New York have a way with them!
"During the past ten years or so, many Japanese ladies of the wealthy classes have been in_ the habit of returning to Tokio from their tours in the West having their large trunks overflowing with unbecoming and expensive clothes. No hat box was completely furnished that did not have a treasured straw pinnacle swathed with white, or it might be, coloured ostrich plumes. But these clear-eyed, somewhat scornful young Japanese women of to-day know exactly what they want in clothes as in other things. It would seem as if most of those who come to study life in our Western cities are in their carly twenties. Usually they have left a babe, or it may be two, in the care of a grandmother. In a few months these young women gain fluency in the English language, and they speak with a Japanese man.
"Tt may be that carly marriage for a recognized practical purpose accounts for the fulfilled' air of these Japanese young women. Self-improvement is their aim. The women of America, France and England have something that these Eastern women want, and they arrange their Programme of travel and study so as to get that something quickly and economically. Their spirit. is.amazing, but their confidence in their power to wrest what they seck from these foreign lands is somewhat touching.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.