The Honest Age

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVI, Issue 7, 19 December 1925, Page 10

The Honest Age

MATERNAL AND FILIAL OUTLOOKS. Sheila and Sally have maintained a close friendship since they were tod-. ( dlers; a beauty and brains . alliance that nothing can shake.' Wide dissimilarities of temperament, little recurrent tiffs and maternal influenceon both sides—working against their mutual loyalty, have been powerless to undermine the solid rock of mutual affection and respect. Sheila, the beauty, respects Sally’s inore than ordinary cleverness. Sally, the almost-plain, but tremendously clever, pays generous tribute to Sheila’s straightforwardness and single-eyed outlook on life and people. Sally probes and analyses; Sheila accepts. MATERNAL UNWISDOM. Sheila’s mother is naturally proud oi her girlie’s looks; Sally’s mothei inordinately proud of her daughter s ' brilliance. Maternal jealousies, finding outlet in critical comment, would have I generated tho belief, in two less inde pendent and less modern types, that the one girl was a consummate intel- : lectual prig, and the other a brainless and almost heartless beauty. It remained for Sheila and Sally to find out about each other for themselves. They did 1 They discovered, amongst other things, that Sally’s “priggishness” masked a sometimes intolerable loneliness of spirit; and that Sheilas so-called “heartlessness” was thoughtlessness, and her brains, though not of the literary order like Sally’s, were bv no means negligable. She “took off” both mammas, for instance, with such excruciating humour, that Sally admitted instantly she would make good on the stage. Sheila painted Sally a rosy feature as a great novei list. And both lamented the fact that their respective mammas should go off I into psychological hysterics, about them i when they got on so well together on their own. ROLES REVERSED. Sheila and Sallv are now sixteen and ' eighteen respectively, and their friend- : ship is firmer than ever. Between ' them they have taught their mothers ’ I something of the outlook of the new i I ago that is rapidly ruling a lot of the 1,1 1 old humbug from human contacts and c relationships. Two quite clever women f are learning that they are not nearly •I so clever as their children. whose e 1 wisdom is of a more direct and more t honest epoch. Where the two elders e I bad nursed their antipathetic streaks . in secret, and got no closer to each other over a long period of years, the youngsters laced theirs from the outset and hud things out with each other With the result that they know the levels on which they can meet to keej I their friendship sweet and sane.