IN THE 'NINETIES

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 112, 8 November 1930, Page 18

IN THE 'NINETIES

DIGNITY AND DECORUM

Mr. E. F. Benson, in his book of reminiscences that has just been published, gives an interesting description of tho "great lady" of the eighties and 'nineties, writes a Londoner. Ho refers to the things she did not do:— "Autumns in London, lip-sticjeing in public, winters on the Biviera, the kippering of her legs and arms, bosom and back, on the sands of the Lido, and the inability to remain in one place for more than a week, were not the habits of the great lady. Above all, she was possessed of that, queer old quality, dignity. Indeed, it is far easier to get near the definition of her by excluding of what she was not than by the inclusion of what she was. She was not in a blazing hurry all the time, she did not run a hat shop or Bit in the House <' Commons, she had no push because there was, nowhere to push, for as regards ppsition she was there already by birth or marriage or b.oth, and the craving that everybody should know how much she was there could not exist in her, for none could doubt it. She did not want to bo advertised or her doings daily to lip miiToivil. AVitli the disappearance of :-n«-li woniPii tlicro vanished every nucleus cC social power, ihe very idea of

which is to-day anti-deluvian notion. 'Society' has so broadened out that, becoming flat in the process, there is no semblance of a peak left." Mr: Benson quotes - -Lady Dorothy INevill: —"Look at the girls nowadays," !shc would say, "playing golf in their thumpin' boots, Ayith never a veil or a pair of gloves, till their skins look like a bit of mahogany veneer. I should think a young man would as soon kiss a kipper. And, to make it worse, they are beginning to daub themselves with lip salve and muck. I never saw such a mess."

'' Entertaining reading and true in spots," continues the writer, "but only in spots, for,' notwithstanding her many faults, I personally think the modern girl as 'great a lady' as her ancestors in the 'eighties and 'nineties."