Changing Styles In Love-Letters

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 364, 26 May 1928, Page 20

Changing Styles In Love-Letters

Sentiment may have gone out of the home, but nobody will deny that woman’s life has been made easier with its passing. And so long as it abides in women’s hearts, which it will, one cannot shed ms.ny tears over the old customs. So long as men and children remain in our midst there is small

danger that dear old romance will desert us, even though a creaky old piano or a gilt-edged landscape must be sacrificed now and then. It is simply a matter of other days, other customs. The locks of hair that used to be wrapped in tissue paper, tied with a coloured string, are dropped on to the hairdresser’s floor and swept into the limbo of departed locks. Whether they return as comfortable mattresses or as plasterers’ aids nobody knows, but whatever becomes of them there is reason to believe they meet a more hygienic end than formerly. The photographs of old loves—first, second and third boy friends, where are they now? Fancy any young modern dedicating an afternoon before her marriage to dreaming with smug conceit, or with tears over the what-might-have-beens, neither being healthy practices.

Stories of the desert sheik, on the other hand, had a prodigious sale a year or so ago, arid women are buying and consuming fiction avidly. Maybe business has made inroads on sentiment, as it used to be known, but no one need moan its passing so long as girls and movie heroes can make hearts go flutter. A while ago a well-known woman wrote bemoaning the passing of the old type of “cherishable” love letters. In this item of romance, perhaps the influence of business is seen more than in any other. The short clipped statements on letter-heads and in type seem to be as straight in their aim as the flourishes or the perfumed envelopes of an earlier day. They used to sell “ladies’ ” writing paper. Now love messages are carried back and forth in envelopes of commercial size and plainness.

Someone said, not long ago, that you may go into a home to-day and shake every volume of poetry the bookshelves contain, and not a pressed flower would fall out. They’re reading poetry, nowadays. Look at the host of young poets who have sprung up over the land. There must be a market for the commodity, or they wouldn’t survive. Which should reassure us that it doesn’t take a pressed flower to reveal a sentimentalist.