FACES THAT TELL STORIES

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 208, 29 May 1926, Page 22

FACES THAT TELL STORIES

OLD THEORIES EXPLODED

Faces, a cynic might say, were given us to conceal our characters, just as words were given us to conceal our thoughts. But we are very often misled on the subject because 'some\ simple-minded person once spread about a theory that men with massive chins possessed strong, primitive passions, and that women with Madonna profiles and viiginal eyes were as innocent as they looked It seemed a jolly sort of a theory, and so it got fairly generally accepted—but I’m certain there’s not a word of truth in it! Once I met an adventuress at Monte Carlo with the face of a convent-bred schoolgirl about to enter upon her novitiate. American film producers, when they saw her. invariably asked her to take the part of Purity in allegories they were producing. The strongest, most deadly determined, iron-willed woman I know has, a face like a Persian kitten’s, with a distinctly receding chin. She has a large, strong husband with the manner of an admiral on the quarter-deck, but when the little woman issues a mandate he scampers to obey it. As a matter of fact, the number of people who look what they are is extraordinarily small. The only famous man I cap think of whose face was an index to his character is Napoleon. But look at the gentle features of Nelson and see if they give anv indication of that unconquerable spirit. Mary Oueen of Scots, unless we are to believe that every painter ,of the period lied, looked a homely girl with a taste fdr cooking. And Lucretia Borgia looked a sober-minded lady with a taste for welfare work.

The blue and limpid eye, the little dimpled chin, that fascinatingly helpless and bewildered air—these belong io the girl who always ends by getting what she wants! And the granite chin, the aquiline nose, and the eagle eye—these belong to the man born to be henpecked by some small, frail woman! It is all very confusing. The thing was rather put into a nutshell for me bv .a conversation I overheard in the train.

"Who’s that nice-looking man in the back page, dear?” "Oh, that’s the murderer, darling—vou know, the one who killed his grandmother with a hatchet!”—Dorothy Buck in the “Daily Mail.”