FAIR AND FORTY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 261, 4 November 1933, Page 3 (Supplement)

FAIR AND FORTY.

CHARM OF MATURITY. (By ANNE ARDEN.) You remember Kipling's poem in which he has immortalised the plaint of "Sweet Seventeen" because the gallant young eligibles forsook her to dance attendance on the woman of forty-nine? They never ran beside her jinricksha wheels, it seemed, while there was any chance of joining the crowd following the wheels of the"lady who was old enough to know better, to the great grief of blueribboned maidenhood who at least knew when 6he was licked. She spent most of the time consoling herself with the arithmetical proof that by the time she was forty-nine her rival would be out of the running. Now, you are not "forty-nine, you have no jinricksha, and the youth and beauty of our time runs rather to no shoulder straps at all than to ribbons of any colour whatsoever. But if the fascinations which bound the adorers to the wheels of the lady in the poem are not yours, no matter what your age, it is your own fault. For, if maturity but knew, it has it all over youth any day, if it will but so believe and desire.

Look at history as well as actual life. Helen of Troy was sixty-odd when she launched a thousand ships by the power of her face alone, and gained as a lover the most fascinating young man in that part of the world. Nearly every famous beauty attains that fame later in life than you would believe, in fact, long after she has passed her first youth.

The beautiful women of the stage to-day are, practically all of them, well out of the flapper class. They have had longer experience in dealing with their own special gifts, they have learned to magnify them, to minimise their deficiencies, and to make the most in every May of whatever gifts the gods have bestowed. They have learned to realise that beauty is a matter of individuality rather than following the prevailing mode and style. The flapper is pretty by the thousands, the mature woman is loveliest when she stands alone. This may be very well to theorise upon, you will say, but how can you get back your lost sense of security in your own charm, which is about one-half the battle? Easily, if you but knew it. But you will have to convince yourself first that your own period in life is lovelier than any you have thus far attained, and can only be matched.by the periods ahead of you and not those which have gone for ever. Let yourself look backward and you arc lost. Look ahead!