WHAT LOVELY SKIN YOU HAVE

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 28, 3 February 1937, Page 16 (Supplement)

WHAT LOVELY SKIN YOU HAVE

Mothers and Grandmothers

Last night at a restaurant I eaw a woman, writes Louis Latzarus in a Continental paper. She was just getting up from one of the tables and gtoing toward the door. She looked like the Girl with the Flaxen Hair and the Cherry Lips, sung by the much lamented Leconte de Lisle. Hairdresser, cosmetician and surgeon must have lent a hand in producing her beauty. She was ravishing—until you looked at her hands. For although the beauty wizards have found means of rejuvenating the face, tile neck and the hair, they have not yet produced ointments and lotions that could teach the hands to lie. Thick veins tell the tale of age. and a brown blemish here and there or a slight swelling of the phalanxes betray the truth. That woman is sixty years old but she refuses to resign herself to the fact. She does not like meeting me because I know it and before I bowed to her last night, I could re ad the anxious prayer in her eyes: “Oh God, do not let him inquire about my daughter or, worse still, my granddaughter 1" She need not have been afraid for I am discreet. But if I don’t say things, I think my part. 1 think of the little girl of five who is the granddaughter of this petulant person, so obstinately clinging to her youth. I know adorable grandmothers who think it the most natural thing in the world to be old and good-humouredly joke about it. They derive beauty from their spiritual wrinkles so to speak. How their eyes shine under the wrinkled eyelids, and how well their cheeks of pale old ivory are set in the frame of the silvery waves, and how. we love and lespect them 1 I fail to see how this person, so pink and fair, with a mouth so perfectly curved, could be respected by her granddaughter *nd I cannot jmagine that her daughter sees a mother in her. There,is a terrible egoism in this obstinacy to seduce and please in spite of the years, but also a childishness which does not make for respect. Can you blame a daughter who suspects all sorts of improper thoughts in a mother so worried about her looks? In short, this belated vanity and frivolity is not a factor of good morality or education The young 'generation of to-day is frequently accused of neglecting the real values, but perhaps the reason is that they have no good example to follow. The fathers have sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. The mania to stay young, which, by the wav, is not confined to the weaker’.6ex, for there

are plenty of ridiculous grandfathers, springs from the materialism with which our thoughts and emotions are imbued. As soon as it becomes conscious ol its environment, the child ia convinced that life is valuable only insofar as it can be enjoyed. Of conr e, . it behaves accordingly. You ask m© whether 1 seriously think that all grandmothers a e like the one described above? No, ot court* 1 don’t, but I know that she is a precursor and that she will have a numerous following. For that matter she aas it already. In the past only the actresses clung to the illusion oi youth and wat<hed jealously over their physical chaims. You could not blame them then, as you cannot to-day, lor there is no more pitiful sight than an ageing The serious thing is that so many women of the middle and upper classes, so raaDy business women try to copy them. Why is it serious, you wonder? Because by doing so they prove that the only thing they are proud of is their complexion, the sparkle iu their eves and the 6liape oi their lips. Becaiu.e it proves that their main preoccupation is to please. Formerly, more or less all mothers resembled a l ttle the mother of the Gracchi whose most precious jewels were her sons. Tuey thought that their charm and glory and their reward consisted, in b*ihg good wives and mothers « and housewives, in lightening the burden of their husbands and setting a good example* for their sous and daughters. Oven this task the mother of old forget and. effaced herself. To-day two out of every three mothers no. longer efface® themselves, nor are they fujly con* scions of the importance of their task. I don’t say it haphazardly tor I fiav# the birth rate statistics before me. The ideal of too many women consists to-day in being pretty and exercising a physical attraction upon men* All aspire to he deemed worthy ol the stage or screen, even though they know that they shall never appear on either. Let it be 6aid, however, that th# men do not teach them to do t*etter. No only do they put up with their extravagance, but they encourage the antics of their wives and daughter, mothers and even grandmothers. The funniest but also the most tragic thing about ifc is that by doing it they sincerely believe that they aie fostering tbe cause of progress and civilisation.