MUNDANE MUSINGS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 68, 11 June 1927, Page 6

MUNDANE MUSINGS

CLUBLAND WHERE MEN SCORE Some women have the hostess flair so strongly developed that they make a complete farce of club membership. It simply isn’t in them to be one of a crowd; to regard the club as the institution it essentially is—a rest from the burden of individual entertaining. When they have once “cottoned on” to certain fellow-members, the hostess instinct is instanly roused. There must be foregatherings at their own private abodes. They must denude the club of quite a number of its Tiabitues in order to entertain them at home. And,

as is the way of such temperaments, they tie themselves up in social knots that clubland was intended to unravel. They link themselves up to all sorts of people who ultimately bore them to death. They deliberately incur private expenses that club life seeks to minimise. They encourage, at parties held beneath their own roof, the sort of personal club gossip that ought to be taboo by any self-respecting club member. In short, they negative the whole principle of collective good fellowship that should form the basis of all clubland ethics. Alen score immeasurably over women because they have a sane and healthy capacity for comunal life along everyday lines to which the incorrigbly individualistic sex has not yet attained. Alen, out of their surer self-knowledge and sounder philosophical acceptance of human nature as it is, are well aware that the “decent sort of chap” they play snooker with, or who is their partner at bridge, is not necessarily the kind of fellow-citizen with whom they could • enter into a David -andJonathan alliance. Women, on the other hand, are constantly seeing soul-mates in those of their sex with whom they exchange desultory gossip over the teacups. One would imagine that the sense of freedom from too intimate daily contacts, the blissful abandonment of individual social effort, the delightfully casual intercourse of club life as men understand it, would be a boon and a blessing to any woman who has known the irk of incessantly impinging personalities in a too familiar domestic or workaday environment. But apparently we are not yet educated up to these larger joys. And so we make dubland a storm-centre rather than a haven of refuge from over-emphasised femininity. We go on, hugging the chains that club life would sever for us—if we gave it a chance. J.H.

The waistline is still one of the foremost pre-occupations of the conturiere. It can be high or it can be low; and it can also be normal. Naturally, the bolero mode definitely affects the waistline, and the trend seems to be toward a bolero at the front only, with a straight back. Emphasising the ceinture in yet another fashion are double and triple belts of various fabrics.