MUNDANE MUSINGS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 51, 23 May 1927, Page 4

MUNDANE MUSINGS

HUNDRED PER CENT. HE-MEN! Something had annoyed our dashing young hero. He flung his lady love nonchalantly across the room, laughed in her face when she burst into tears, and strode out in the garden. Later on he returned, still in the same charming mod. His lady love, who obviously had no pride, sidled up to him and tried to cajole him by placing lily-white hands on his brow, but he wrenched them off. and muttered what looked like a really naughty word. When she persisted in her attentions, he threw her about the room a bit more. “Isn’t he lovely?” sighed an enraptured damsel dreamily, and when her escort, a mild-looking little man, who obviously adored her, didn’t reply with enough enthusiasm to suit her, she turned and rent him. “Oh, you’re • jealous! ” she jeered. “All men are, because they know that girls are mad about him. He’s a dream!”

She was right there, for luckily this type of young man is nothing but a novelist’s dream, or perhaps I should say nightmare? Tie doesn’t exist, and never has or will, although sometimes in sordid divorce or police court cases we read of men who seem to have modelled their behaviour on our film friend.

But instead of wasting precious moments dreaming of the bliss of meeting one of these 100 per cent hemen of fiction and film, the girls who admire them so might reflect on what life with one of them would really be like.

In the film, of course, once the little misunderstanding is cleared up, our friend becomes the perfect lover, and, pressing his beloved’s hands to his lips, he sinks on one knee before her and asks her if she can ever forgive him. She, with a sweet smile, raises him to his feet, and with a cry of

“But I loved you all the time, my prince,-” falls into his arms. And then, arm in arm, you see them walking towards the sunset, all misunderstandings forgotten.

You go out into the cold, wet night, envying the lucky girl who has won such a prize. You imagine 4iim the perfect lover all through their married life, and feel that the knocking about she got in the first half of the film was well worth it if it brought her such happiness at the end. Perhaps in Filmland, which is notoriously a queer place, a 100 per cent he-man -would turn into an ideal husband, but I’m quite certain he wouldn’t in real life. Knowing his capacity for losing his temper about nothing, I pity his poor wife when something went wrong with the breakfast eggs and bacon. She’d have the coffee pot flung at her head in a trice. Of course, later on, when she’d cooked him some more, and crawled about the floor a bit, he’d probably condescend to forgive her, and might even make passionate love to her, but if I were the girl in question that wouldn’t help matters. I should loathe picking coffee grounds out of my hair. Besides, love-making is out of place at breakfast-time!