As her sex are seldom exposed to the cold of the
night or the mists, their underclothing is slight and close fitting.
Eveena's thin robe, of the simplest possible form--two wide straight
pieces of a material lustrous as satin but rivalling the finest
cambric in texture (lined with the same fabric reversed), sewn
together from the hem of the skirt to the arm, and fastened again by
the shoulder clasps--fell perfectly loose save where compressed by the
zone or by the movements of the wearer; and where so compressed,
defined the outlines of the form as distinctly as the lightest wet
drapery of the studio. Her dress, in short, achieved in its pure
simplicity all at which the artistic skill of matrons, milliners, and
maidens aims in a Parisian ball costume, without a shadow of that
suggestive immodesty from which ball costumes are seldom wholly free.
Exactly reversing Terrestrial practice, a Martial wife reserves for
strictest domestic privacy that undressed full-dress, that frank
revelation of her beauty, which the matrons of London, Paris, or New
York think exclusively appropriate to the most public occasions.
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