The final selection of 12 Queens of Beauty, each to represent one of the industries contributing most to women's adornment at the Women's Fair at Olympia in November, was made this week, The selection committee consisted of a sculptor, a painter, two women and, of course, Mr. C. B. Cochran. For weeks beforehand potential queens had been weeded out, from hundreds of photographs, down to a few dozen. Each in turn. dressed to represent some particular adornment—silk-wear knitwear, stockings, millinery, cosmetics—smiled "and curtseyed her way past the committee in a room at the Park Lane hotel.
It had been impressed on the girls that mere beauty of face would count for less than a pleasing manner and deportment. But even selection committees are human and the queens are a lovely lot For the next two months they will go through an intensive training in how to walk. sit, speak and wear all manner of frocks. Each onè will receive £50 for her work during the exhibition. But what will become of her afterwards nobody seems to bother.
What does become of all these "queens"? Since some girl was asked to leave the convent school where she was a pupil because she was billed to appear in public as Lady Godiva, there has been a perfect boom in Godivas. Recently we have had the pictures of all the "Mi various countries of Europe who are to compete with American beauties ing a lost art. He hunted through all the big stores of London and could not find one. A shop assistant said cynically that if there were any on view people would buy them, "but they will not buy anything that is not under their noses." The fact is that "fixed basins h & c in all rooms" and bathrooms with hot towel rails, which. even the shoddiest villa boasts nowadays, have extinguished towel-horses, as they are extin-gushing that dreadful relic, the mar-bie-topped washstand.
But other symbols of bygone respectability are moving into oblivian, How often now does one see a brass bedstead? Indeed more and more people are not buying beds at all but divans which can be used in the day as sofas, which in consequence are being asked for less and less. The cheval glass swinging on pivots in a tall narrow frame, in which our grandmothers surveyed themselves full length, is rarely seen now; a long mirror on the inside of a wardrobe door does its work. The old heavily wrought fire-irons are giving way to small pillars from which hang poker, tongs and brush, beastly little things which go over with a crash at the least movement. But these will not last long, as central heating and gas fires become more and more general. These too will give way to electricity; plates let into the wall about 2 feet from the oer, electrically heated, are becoming very popular. It would be interesting to know what houses will look like a century hence, when our descendants go to museums to see such curiosities as bedsteads, sofas, coal grates—and towel-horses.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.