WOMEN'S CIGARETTES.

Auckland Star, Volume L, Issue 254, 25 October 1919, Page 17

WOMEN'S CIGARETTES.

NO LONGER REGISTER FEMININE DEPRAVITY. The Englishwoman has been warned that she must not smoke in railroad ears that are not expressly reserved for that purpose, says the "San Francisco Argonaut." The complacence of the other passengers does not matter at all. The pretty woman who glances airily around the car and asks if anyone objects to her smoking knows quite well that no one will object—at least not audibly. The poor abject male worm who loathes tobacco will try and look as though it were essential to his earthly happiness and to his hopes of heaven. The woman knows quite well that sh e can do what she pleases, how she pleases, and where she pleases. For fifty years she has insisted that the male smoker shall be quarantined in seme filthy cattle truck, but now that she smokes herself she • overrides all. regulations and restrictions. Henceforth she, too, must go to the cattle truck for her , cigarette. The casual "nobody objects?" goes no more. A few years ago Mrs. Patrick Campbell walked through the foyer of a fashionable hotel in New York smoking a cigarette. All the other women gasped with horror, although most of them had cigarettes iir- their pockets. Moreover, the manager hurried to the scene of action and asked Mrs. Campbell to remember that she was a little lady, or j words to that effect. Mrs. Campbell protested and her box-office receipts went up forthwith, which is the sort of thing that usually happens when we assert our superior virtues. To-day the same foye/ of the same hotel is crowded with women, and most of tbem smoke. There are no hotels that object to the cigarette 'in feminine hands. If women wished to give themselves hypodermic injections of cocaine in public or asked for opium pipes there would be a momentary-reps--tition of" the gasps and protests and then there would be the usual slavish surrender. The cigarette on the stage was always supposed to register feminine depravity. In our younger and guileless days we knew all about the abandoned creature whose role demanded, the cigarette. There was no need to tell us about the other things" she had been doing. Indeed, we should not have understood if we had been told. We all knew that bad women did dreadful things, and that was aU that it was nice to know about them. Those bad thing- were inclusively indicated by the cigarette which meant the Scarlet Woman —mentioned in Revelations and therefore discreetly permissible, but without specifications. The cigarette was a sort of synopsis of the broken decalogue. The "Second Mrs. Tanqueray" and "The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsm'th" both - smoked cigarettes. So did "'Carmen," and "Sappho," and "Zaza." The cigarette was regular stage property. The moment the cigarette appeared we knew that the smoker -was no better than she should be. She was a baggage. But nowadays even the nicest of dramatic characters is allowed to smoke. In fact, we like them to smoke. So the •world does, after all, move. But we may confess to some disappointment with th_ smoking woman. We had hopes that tobacco would assuage those temperamental asperities, acidities, 'and angularities from which we have suffered long and silently. It has done nothing of the sort. As a lubricant, a solvent, an emollient, it must be said to have failed.