LETTERS OF LEISURE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13086, 27 January 1906, Page 1 (Supplement)

LETTERS OF LEISURE.

No. 111. Dear Pandora, — So. my faithful though flippant description of afternoon-tea-orgies tailed to convince you of their hollow ness, which only proves that each one of us must take his own medicine from the vast pharmacopoeia of worldly experiences. Every pleasure, like every poison, has its antidote. Indeed, it is pretence in the whirl of the world, but polite pretence, which is its saving virtue and it.- greatest source of pleasure, the pleasure or the masquerade. Do we not play the game of "Pretend" from the time we don pinafores'.' Recall your favourite pastime when you were a little girl. "Let's pretend," you said to the little neighbour who came to play with you. "Let's pretend wo arc grown up. I'll be Mrs. Violet, and you will be Mrs. Primrose, and we'll pretend we are calling on each other. Oh ! it's such fun to pretend I" And you play at it all day. And as the years roll on you pose and masquerade unconsciously, and so quite naturally, until Time has carried you to the threshold of selfstyled society and embraced you as an eligible member, and still, "it's such fun to pretend." Then the greater your amiability, backed by solid worldly wares, the greater your success. The more subtle your smile and your compliment, the greater your popularity. For "feed ami Hatter" applies to woman no less than man. But flatter adroitly. Flatter with taste ami finesse. The artistic flatterer should b? incapable of a bald, crude compliment. Let your method of flattering be by implication rather than utterance. ■ (hie of the celebrated Frenchwomen of the eighteenth century salonswas it Madame Recamier?—affords a delicious instance- of the success of subtly flattery, which she applied universally, and thereby gained for herself tho reputation of being the most fascinating and brilliant hostess of her day. She achieved this tame, by greeting every guest with a glad, rapturous smile, and a, low, sweet confidential "at last." sighed over an ardent hand-clasp. She sped each parting guest with a tender lingering hand pressure and a sad murmur, "so soon!" Ah! she was an artiste! From Madame Recamier to your Mrs. Pratt, is ai disastrous tumble, but "other times, other women." Judging by your latest account of her, I should be inclined to change her soubriquet of Mount Mellow to Mount Muddy, her over-ripeness turning into the decay of wit. tainted by maudlin levity. Should she sink deeper into this sort of chatty, fatty degeneracy she will cease to be amusing. Therefore, if you value your mental processes, never ask her about her poetry. Instead of her verses composing they should be decomposing! Which is not original, but is a borrowed bit of brilliant repartee re the composer Brahms. " What has Brahms been composing lately':" gurgled a, would-be musical dame ait a, dinner party.

" He's not composing,'' replied a musical critic next her ; he's decomposing •

Why not recommend the straight-front corsets to Mrs. Pratt, even if you have to go to the length of helping to truss her in the first few times? On her opulent form they would produce an artistic displacement of superfluous flesh, and improve the prodigal hand of Nature, which, when once started, lays adipose tissue on with a trowel, never stopping to " shade off" with an artist's brush, as it were. Fat, like painter's £rtg#teHts, is plastic, you will find. But I am inking more of the moral effect" on Mrs. Pratt than the physical. Perhaps, in exact ratio as the straight-front stays held her in physically, so should the physical restraint confine mental, sentimental vagaries. She cannot "let herself go" either way. Neither fat nor wit can run riot. The corsets may serve ms a sort of moral straight-jacket, warranted to strangle, had poetry and worse wit in their whalebone grip.' All of which is vanity, and leads me circuitously to the question discussed in Mrs. Humphry Ward's " Marriage of William Ashe." * "Resolved," said "Kitty, "that men are* vainer than, women,'' and then proceeds to prove, most- -engagingly, that woman's love of pretty clothes and of admiration is purely a sense of duty, not a vanity! A duty women owe to men—the painful duty of pleasing men ! What do you think of this logic, Pandora? And have you read the book? You should. it's literature, and will live. It is a political novel, finer, stronger, and more convincing than any of Disraeli's. It gives a graphic picture of the social-political life in aristocratic England of to-day. It gives us humcin portraitures, taken from the lives of men and women of an earlier England ; for Ashe is Lord Melbourne, Kitty is Lady Caroline Lamb, and Cliffe is Byron—only phases and episodes from the lines of these, galvanised into read life and set moving, expanding, evolving their destinies under the unfaltering hand of a. literary artist.

Now, Mrs. Humphry Ward is a womain, I should imagine, whose waitch keeps perfect time 355 days, just like a man's! She has that order of mind, a big, broad, deep, practical mind, cognisant of the value of time, just like a man's.

Ordinary women's watches never go, never keep proper time, are always out of order. Have you ever noticed it? That's the cause and effect of the uupunctuality of our sex. Even the ballot-box has not made us punctual. Is it part of our lack of honour in small things which Schopenhauer—that cynical enemy of Eve —maintains as characteristic of the sex? A failure to keep our word—-our covenant with Ti:::e.

Half the women I know never wear their watches; the other half wear miniature timepieces in bracelets or pendants, surrounded by pearls or other precious stones. purely for ornament. Most of them marry their husbands to have the time handy without winding it up, Ido believe. The man of the house always keeps the clocks in order, does he not?" It must bs that women as a sex, en bloc, regard Time and its painful recording as an arch enemy, to whose account they* give as little heed as possible. Few women know what date it is. By persistently ignoring clock time and calendar time woman has so trained herself that by the time she is thirty she succeeds in completely forgetting her own age! Has the "English gentleman who wants to go partners in a farm" materialised yet. or has he written? It would read like a "Personal" from a matrimonial agency. "Gentleman, English, educated, High Church, tall, fair, and 35, good-tempered and temperate, desires to meet a teal lady who owns a small farm, with view to financial and matrimonial partnership. . . ' How's that? Takes the romance off at first glance, eh? Well, I'll not anticipate, or throw a cold douche on Cupid's possibilities or disabilities. I realise that you are at the impressionable age. like every fair young thing who. like Andromeda, chained to the rock of single-boredom, awaits.her Perseus to capture and carry her into the land of married oblivion. I await developments. Faithfully yours, I'm-: SI'HI.VX.