WHAT YOU REALLY WANT. . .

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17729, 26 December 1925, Page 4

WHAT YOU REALLY WANT. . .

T own a cottage. It’s years old and looks it; it lias all the inconveniences of its period, and there isn’t a straight floor or door or window 7 anywhere. But I like it like that, and it just amuses me when my friends look it over, gasj : “How very quaint! And don’t you find it lonely in the winter?” But when Estelle looked it over she smiled a superior smite when I pointed out how unusual it was to be able, to lie in bed and study the view outside through a chink in the wall. When I’d finished she said, absentmindedly: “Yes, I sec. Now, what you really want . . .” and went on to describe her cousin’s up-to-the-minute labour-saved, electrically run house in the Garden City. Now, I ask you: If I had “ really” wanted a house like that, shouldn’t I have had one built? But Estelle doesn’t stop to reason; she just decides what you want. She met Maisie at the other day 7. . . .As usual Maisie was choosing a new hat. Just a little pull-on to go with her new woolly motoring suit. Estelle took charge at once. “ Now, what you really want,” she said, “is one of those new felts covered with fiat flowers, and . She said it so convincingly that, the saleswoman actually 7 went to look for one of them, and Maisie only saved herself by deciding that she’d come back another da'* after her hair had been trimmed again. You’ve an Estelle among y 7 our friends, I expect. When you've arranged your bazaar stall so that it looks just too attractive, along comes Estelle. “ What we really want is that green pottery in the centre,” she say*s breezily*, and proceeds to put it there, upsetting all your carefully-planned scheme. The irritating thing is that she means well. To her that seems the most effective arrangement, and she can’t imagine you caring for anything less than the best. And there you are! If it’s a concert you're planning, or a flannel dance, or a dav in the country —somehow or other Estelle will take a hand, and “ what you really want ” finds its way into the arrangements. She’s so definite about it that y*ou begin to wonder whether you had intended that very thing, after all. Estelle waved aside m3 7 pet plan for giving the cottage an expanse of lawn by sowing a packet of grass seed at a time as I could afford it. What I really want, she insist, is to turf the whole stretch at once and be done with it. (Obviously she has never had the fun of watching tiny pale green hairs grow by magic into real “lawn.”). “ I don’t want turf,” I say, implacably. “ What I do want is to do my own garden in my own wav.” As a matter of fact, that isn’t strictly true. What I really want is something lingering with boiling oil, to mete out to all those folks who will make up other people’s minds for them.