HABITS IN CLOTHES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 198, 22 August 1935, Page 6

HABITS IN CLOTHES.

In the matter of summer clothes all women are wiser than most men (says "The Times"). They keep their necks and their wrists free. They wear hats, and curls. Some of them wear little socks instead of stockings, which allows (for such as are slim enough to risk it) freedom from the sort of garment that is needed to hold stockings up. Except for the morbid delusion (now probably subsiding) that long trousers are cooler than short skirts, women both agree better and do better in the heat than men. Upon hats and collars for hot weather men (ordinary men, who are neither exhibitionists nor high-souled reformers) are never likely to agree. Midrib agre maintains that no hat is so eool as the tall hat, which to others, defiantly hatless or jauntily gent's-boatered, sounds* like nonsense; and, where one man is strangling himself with a soft collar, another hopefully starts the day with a stiff collar (lets the air get to your neck and throat, you know), which is a soft collar by after lunch. In food and drink there are the two opposed schools—the grasshoppers. who take the cash and let the credit go, and with iced drinks and mayonnaise and aspic buy present relief at the price of future pain, and the ants, who, heeding the rumble of the distant drum, earn with hot roast mutton and tea a deferred case. And so it is with habits —with baths, hot or cold; with windows, open or shut; with exercise, violent, gentle or purely intellectual. Discussing these questions, people will grow quite hot. And Jupiter, puzzled still, as he was in old John Heywood'a play of "The Wether," about human beings' ideas on the subject, must wonder why the disputants never get to the true secret of keeping cool. It is a secret (as vvery schoolboy knows in these enlightened days) that lias nothing to do with mutton, or collars, or anything material. The secret of keeping cool is to keep cool. It is to remain (like the character in the farce when he was on the point of bursting into a fury) "perfectly calm and perfectly collected."