THE REIGNING BEAUTY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21244, 27 January 1931, Page 15

THE REIGNING BEAUTY.

Who is the reigning beauty in England now? Sir William, Orpen, who has painted, perhaps, more beautiful Englishwomen than any other artist in our time, told me of the lovely girl who, to his mind, is going to ravish the imagination of this generatian and charm the eyes of Europe as Lady Diana Cooper has for the past 25 years, states a London writer. “ It's no good looking for the new beauty among the society women,” he said, stopping abruptly every now and then and looking at me over his spectacles, "because she isn’t there. You won’t find her at fashionable weddings and parties, because she doesn’t go to those things. She’s got something better to do. But you may find yourself suddenly sitting next to her in the tube, or she may pass you in the morning on her way to work, or she may serve you at a shop counter. She isn’t a society girl, and has never had it drummed into her that she’s a ravishing beauty. She’s an ordinary, hard-working person like you or me. And she’s the loveliest thing in the whole length and breadth of the country. Mind you, it wasn’t always so! ”—again the sudden stop, and the piercing, humorous glance over the spectacles. “When I was a young man the middle and working classes didn’t produce beautiful women. The working girl has become a beauty in the last 15—no, in the last 10 years! Sometimes,” he said, “X see girls in the trains and omnibuses so lovely that I don’t know how tov look at them enough. They don’t paint their faces/ they’re smart and neat; they walk like girls, and there’s life in their healthy faces, . . . that’s beauty for you! Thais the sort of girl who’s inheriting the society beauty’s laurels! The one is dead and the other’s alive, and it’s the living one that posterity is going to remember as the beauty of her generation.”