Knoxville Daily Chronicle

Another Female Mania
The newest mania among fashionable women, married and unmarried alike is to make their bedrooms beautiful. The lately acquired taste for decoration is taking that turn just now to the utter neglect of parlors and other apartments. Pillow shams and bedspreads are laboriously and expensively covered with needlework and lace; dressing cases are furnished with elaborated and ingenious receptacles for toilet articles; bottles and boxes of the finest material and workmanship hold her ladyship's cologne, perfumery and powder; more or less excellent pictures hang on the walls, or the walls are wholly covered with lace. In short the rage for sleeping in beautiful rooms has possessed every woman. Even her toilet crockery must now be of no ordinary ware. She washes her hands in a ceramic bowl, colors her lips and eyebrows out of a crackled Japanese saucer and uses a copy of a Pompeian handglass to see her back hair.
The ideal bed of the day has a canopy over it, and this is made as fine and beautiful as the money and taste of the woman will permit. The frameworks are made of metal, commonly burnished brass or nickel. Chintz and cretonne are ordinarily used for the curtains; but satin velvet and the better laces enter into the combination. Unmarried women affect white and the most delicate colors for these canopies, and put white doves atop, as emblems of purity-so that the midnight marauder may comprehend the situation at a glance. A novel device is a rack, handsomely constructed of black walnut or ebony, with books for hanging a woman's underwear handily. The chemise, the corset, the stockings, the shoes, all have their places, so that a woman may be as orderly as she likes in undressing, and without the old trouble of using all the chairs in the room. Some of the bed rooms of the period are really marvels of exquisite taste-too sweet and dainty by far to deserve the rude occupancy of husbands. However, the best of these apartments belong to maidens, who show them with coyness and pride to their male friends. The dazed fellows stand palpitating on the threshold, gazing in at the vision of innocent somnolency and swearing on the spot to marry the tenant of that beautiful bed or die. The natural result of all this will be an unusual number of weddings this winter.