THE BRITISH BACHELOR GIRL.

Auckland Star, Volume XLI, Issue 67, 19 March 1910, Page 15

THE BRITISH BACHELOR GIRL.

LIVES OF LONELY INDEPENDEI IN TINY FLATS. (BY A NEW ZEALAND GD3L.),

LONDON, Feb. 4. One of the many strangenesses of I London life, to a colonial, is the fact that such numbers of girls like to live alone in the city. By like I mean prefer, for the errermstance of living alone is the result of carefully planned out severance of all home ties, responsibilities and obligations. As a member of an old-established ■woman-writers' club, I come every day a good deal into contact with the typical | bachelor girl, and have many opportunities of studying her in her varying degrees of young bachelor girl, midle-aged bachelor girl, and decidedly ancient bachelor girl. Still always bachelor "girl"— that is one capital attribute of the present day point of view; the hideous title " old maid" no longer is heard except among malicious young married folk of both sexes, and their opinions are not always ■weighty. In appearance, I find girls almost identical with those I know in New Zealand, for instance—apparently as bright faced and natured and as ■warm hearted com- ! rades as New Zealanders. And yet as I write that last tribute—l don't know! Since woman obviously was not created, j any more than her other half, to live I alone, it stands to reason that a bachelor ! life must have a distinct effect upon her ; personality, and that again, eventually, upon her bearing towards the world in general. Let us see what she loses and what she gains. She drops out of her life all the multifarious domesticities that are considered, or were considered, tthe just lot of woman. ■PTPTR. UKE. She lives alone. In France sisters ■will often keep house together, in the colonies enterprising girl friends arrange to board together, and share the rights of ownership of a common sitting and perhaps bedroom. In England, hundreds of girls, probably more, live absolutely alone. j Some of them that I have come across ! have sisters doing the same thing, not five miles distant. If she can afford it, the bachelor girl delights in a tiny bedroom, sittingroom, kitchen. Bathroom and scullery are non est! I heard one sceptical weD-groomed brother once ask, inquisitively, how one managed about a morning tub in a girl's - : flat. I " I stand on my bed," the bachelor girl i assured him, " and take a header into my I ■wash-basin!" And more unlikely stories ! have been recommended for the ears of I marines, as will be evident. i HARD-UP HEROINES. I If she is " down on her luck"—and [ there isn't in the wide universe a more j plucky, sturdy heroine, often, than the I girl in that piteous plight—the bachelor I girl lives in one tiny upstairs room in a I poor-class boarding house. To carry out I her ideal of " developing individuality," I then, she must forego all superfluous 1 luxuries, from the appreciation of spoti less napery to a waiting maid with a cap ion her head, and the numberless "inj betweens."

That she is, whatever her rank as a bachelor girl, a j very earnest being goes ■without saying. The tennis parties, card-parties, picnics, musicaJ evenings of conventional home life form, no part of hers -whose evenings ?.re now spent as she likes, with a book, sewing, music or painting. Lunch is gencraJly ta.ken a.t her club or a favourite restaurant. One meets the same girls, month in, month out, going through the same menu —if a stodgy meat pie and tea, and perhaps a plate of stewed fruit can be so dignified—with the same air of quiet importance. There's as much difference in the air with which a bachelor girl planks down sevenpence for a Innch earned by herself and that with -which a maiden of suburbia timidly gives five shillings of her father's money for a pair of evening gloves as can be imagined. These are the pros. I speak from the bachelor girl's point of view. THE CONS. From my point of view, she is narrowminded in that she admits of absolutely no pros—l speak as an outsider, an admirer, but a critic. Tutting aside, with grim determination, the sock-darning obligations and the hundred petty worries that eat into the soul of the born ermrncipee till all life seems a grievance, and " woman's sphere" a polite name for unremunerated fiunkeydom, tho bachelor girl puts aside a deal else also. And the seck-darning is the least. It is every woman's nature to mother something, and crushing out tho verycores of her being, whatever the plea, she does away with the deaTest link that binds her to all humanity, be it man or beast. * If bachelordom were for a specific time only, a girl could perhaps afford to temporarily drop her so-called purely feminine attributes in order to gain the undoubted charm of sturdy independence. It is not so, however. When tho bachelor girl maps out her existence it is as a permanency, and there are enough finished middle-aged and old examples to show that as she begins she ends.