Dear sir, - You print in "London Life" so many pictures of chorines and actresses with beautiful legs which are insured for this and that amount that it makes one wonder if symmetrically perfect underpinnings are necessary for every girl. I know that they are considered of primary importance if one has theatrical ambitions, but - correct me if I am wrong - was not the divine Sarah Bernhardt lame?
I would like (from "Historicus" and others) a complete list of all famous women who achieved fame and fortune despite their lameness; for, as you may have guessed, I am a cripple myself.
I know that Wallace Stort and others profess to admire one-legged girls above all others, but I know from personal experience that a crippled girl is very often the target far many glances; but alas, they are of pity, not of admiration.
No; I am not afraid as the years roll on, I feel that it is becoming increasingly necessary for girls to have perfect legs rather than delude themselves that "legs don't matter."
At the same time, I would like to point out to Wallace Stort and others that their so called love for one-legged girls arises out of a real fear of the crippled state!
I feel sure that our reader-psychologist "Brother of the Shadow" will bear me out in this statement.
During the many years which I spent as an inmate of hospitals and crippled children's homes, I found that many people were inclined to cherish or profess a morbid love for what they most hated or feared, and I think that if Wallace Stort and others confessed frankly that it was an inborn horror of being one-legged themselves that had inverted itself and emerged as a form of admiration for one of the opposite sex who happened to be so afflicted, they would be really telling the honest truth for once!
As it is, they, by their eulogistic letters, are trying to fill we one-legged girls with the delusion that our very infirmity increases our attraction, whereas we know from past and bitter experiences that being one-legged decreases from our attractiveness at least 60 per cent.
I, though anything but a tramp would personally decline to dress in a way that would reveal and not conceal my lameness, as Wallace Stort advises his heroines to do: I may be lame, but that is my misfortune, and should never be so misguided as to accept Stort's wild theories as gospel, for I fear that would make me an object of not pity, but contempt!
Yours truly
A One-Legged But Not Deluded Girl.