Naturally I can be smart when I want to, though perhaps the surprised acclamation of my friends when I am got up is not altogether complimentary, says Margaret Kornitzer in "Eve's Journal."
And when I'm smart I like it, and it gives a delirious sense of power, and for the time being all things are possible. In fact permanently smart women don't get half the kick out of being smart that I do.
The same with the permanent drunk and the occasional drunk, no doubt. You get the taste for it and then the habit, and after thal a lot of what you fancy does you no good.
Tve watched certain women getting smarter and smarter each year, and there is no end to it. Even if you had ten thousand a year it wouldn't solve the problem in the leas; because you couldn't buy forty: eight hours a day.
Even then, by the time you had finished all the five-minute beauty exercises, the hair-drills, the face-routines, the hand-loveliness treatments, the bosom-uplifts, the double-chin campaigns and the rest, you wouldn't have enough time left out of your forty-eight hour diy to read up the next day's routine.
So I've seen my friends getting smarter and smarter and more and more haggard about it, so that they need many, many facials to help them to stand up to the fray. And I feel beautifully restful because, once and for all, I have refused the challenge of chic.
Long ago I felt the same blessed release when I first refused a dare, no longer to be bound by the rigid convention that had made me walk on high walls, ring doorbells and otherwise play the sturdy young Briton that I was not.
Well, then, on a historic day or days (I forget which) I looked at my figure, which was a good useful sire; and I looked at the reflection of my face, battleground of all my emotions, every wrinkle and angle of which had its story (ce nest pas magnifique mais chest la guerre)
And I said to this reflection: "That is what you have got and you must stick to it. If you were a man you could put the necessary minimum of clothes on your torso to cover its nakedness, and shave your face daily to reveal its nakedness, and that would be all. You could then forget them. But because you have the delirious good fortune to be a woman, it is inevitable that you must CHOOSE. And it looks as if you had already chosen."
Every student of the modern woman's problem knows that women must choose. They must choose to be beautiful or they must choose the thing that is worse than death—a permanent seat on the shelf. lovely motor rides with Mr. Right. no close-ups, no nothing.
But, as you all know, it is a woman's own fault if she is plain, because To-day Beauty is Every-woman's Heritage.
To be quite candid, I never finally made the irrevocable choice. It just happened that there was something more interesting to do than renovate ing the neck-or waist-line of last year's frock; something that seemed more urgent than that half-hour with my skin, something more absorbing to read than the lastest fashion book. T never found the daily heart to leap out of bed for the joyous exercises before an open window which would have done such grand work on bowels, blackheads and my chances of matrimony.
In reality then, I am just one curve of good intentions and least resistance. I know, of course, that it is the duty of a conscientious woman always to look as though she might be ready for anything. But what an effort! How wearying to be smart and to have to live up to it! I should die of ennui.
But, naturally, I can be smart when I want to. under the honorary chairmanship of Better Building Bishop John with Mr. E. F. Harris as chairman, This board controls the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.