HORTENSE AND ZELIE AT HOME.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 August 1932, Page 14

HORTENSE AND ZELIE AT HOME.

(By Elisabeth Kyle.) The older Hortense and Zelic get, fihe more they clijtg to the great rambling country house just outside Dieppe, inwhich they spent their childhood. Friends of their youth 'have said, time and again, that it would be better for Hortense and Zelie io sell the house for what it would fetch, considering it has neither electric light nor a “salle do bain.” Then they could move into a small flat, or. even into a home for gentlewomen. ■ It would be more sensible than putting that ridiculous advertisement into the English papers each year about “Paying guests receive ed in a French country house near the coast,” and then Zelie half 'killinc herself with the cooking and Hortense with the housework.

But when their half-forgotten cousin, the Lyons advocate, died and left them some money early this spring, everybody rejoiced. Now Zelie and Hortense might stay in the’ yellow stucco house, with its two acres of half-wild fruit bushes and ornamental grasses; unworried by . strange young. English men and women who were resigned -by the reasonable terms to the lack of a bath-: room, but fractious about constant supplies of hot water. ‘ , The two old sisters sat in the sum-mer-house reviewing the situation. The gooseberry bushes promised a. record crop. “Such a waste!” Zelie sighed, “we shall nev°r be able t< eat them ourselves.”

Her sister was silent. Now there was money to have the mattresses' renewed, but it was no use renewing them since the great old-fashioned bedrooms would never again be inhabited by strange guests, whose arrival gave her and her sister such pleasureable interest. “The- striped room could have its chaise lounge now,” she said suddenly. “Do you remember, Zelie, how the London actress grumbled at there being none?”

They both smiled, remembering the actress’ charm, and their childlike wonder at the cosmetics with which she strewed the old-fashioned striped room. They forgot her selfishness, and the huff in which she left.

Hortense’s thoughts wandered on to the economical Anglo-Indian family, their langour, their strange tales of life in the tropics. Zelie was thinking of the white-faced young man who had amused them all with his funny stories, who had painted the side of the salon with' a fresco in the ISth-century manner—and then decamped ■without paying. “Madame Dubois comes out to lunch-to-morrow,” Hortense broke in. Zelie shivered involuntarily. Was the tide -of youth and. fresh -adventure, which for a few weeks each year absorbed them in its current, going to ebb away from them as it had from such harsh-featured old autocrats as Sophie Dubois?*'

“If you will help me, we can draw up our little advertisement now,” she said suddenly with decision. “Do you think we should reduce our terms w pension in consideration of the English difficulties with the pound?”

Concerning Poetry. Miss Edith Sitwell, a poet of great modernism herself, writes about poetry in the Morning Post as follows: — “We cannot tell from what roots ■poetry may spring, a -poem is like a flower,, and its perfume is part of its being and cannot be exiplained. But like the flower, poetry has perfection of shape and balance and texture, as well as that unexplainable leaven o'f ,perfume that is its inspiration. A poet should be so sensitive in the matter of texture and shape that were ■verses transformed into flowers he could tell a lily from a rose, a buttercup from a cowslip, in no matter how starless or moonless a night. But a lamentable age has dawned upon us, when a poppy or a rose cut out of red cotton and fixed upon a wire stalk is held as, if anything, preferable to the real poppy and the true rose.”

Sybil Thorndike’s Message. An interesting portrait of Dame SybilThorndike appears in “Dawn,” an Australian women’s -paper. She had a message sent her from the women when she arrived in Australia, and sent the following reply: —“I should like to say to the readers of ‘The Dawn’ how muelii impressed I am by the spirit of the women I have met in Perth. I feel the world needs the work of women more than ever before—-in public life particularly—women who are single-mind-ed and selfless. With the example of i wonderful women pioneers ahead of us, we must not lag behind. Your paper, I‘The Dawn’ (what a splendid name!), ■ has given me a real ‘spur on.’ . The Australian women certainly are stimulants —good luck to us all —us women—lots of work in front of us —and we will do it!”