FACES THAT TELL STORIES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3049, 17 June 1926, Page 1

FACES THAT TELL STORIES.

OLD THEORIES EXPLODED. Faces, a cynic might say, were given us to conceal our characters, just as words were given us to conceal our.thoughts. But we are very often misled on the subject because some simpleminded person once spread about a theory that men with massive chins possessed strong, primitive passions, and that women with madonna profiles and virginal eyes were as innocent as they looked. It seemed a jolly sort of a theory, and so it got fairly generally accepted —but I’m certain there’s not a word of truth in it! Once I met an adventurist at Monte Carlo with the face of a convent-bred schoolgirl about to enter her novitiate. American film producers, when they saw her, invariably asked her to take the part fo Purity in allegories they were producing. The strongest, most deadly-de-termined, iron-willed woman I know has a face like a Persian kitten’s, with a distinctly receding chin. She has a large, strong husband with the manner of an admiral on the quarter-deck, but when the little woman issues a mandate he scampers to obey it. As a matter of fact, the number of people who look what they are is extraordinary small. The only famous man I can think of whose face is an index to his character is Napoleon. But look at the gentle features of Nelson and see if they give any indication of that unconquerable spirit. Mary Queen of Scots, unless we are to believe that every painter of the period lied, looked a homely girl with a taste for cooking. And Lucretia Borgia looked a soberminded lady with a taste for welfare work. The blue and limpid eye, the little dimpled chin, that fascinatingly helpless and bewildered air—these belong to the girl who always ends by getting what she wants. And the granite chin, the equilinc nose, and the eagle eye—-these belong to the man born to lie henpecked by some frail woman! It is all very confusing. The thing was rather put into a nutshell for me by a conversation I overheard in the train. “Who’s that nice-looking man in the back page, dear?” “Oh, that’s the —murderer, darling —you know, 1 lie one who killed his grandmother with a hatchet!” —Dorothy Buck, in the Daily Mail.