THE CHAMELEON GIRL.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18011, 23 November 1926, Page 12

THE CHAMELEON GIRL.

—is quite frankly a puzzle. This writer exposes the fallacies in her philosophy. We’ve all met her upon some occasion, and failed to “place” her. She isn’t a typical “sports girl,” with a swinging stride, sensible tweeds and frank, breezy, open manner. Neither is she a typical doll that greets you always with the same “American movie magazine” stare, snuggled in furs with little else besides. Neither is she the sensible stable product, which, after all, forms the bulk of the female element of the community. You can’t place her in any female category, because she is a human chameleon, and changes her pose as often as her frocks. She’s influenced as much by the films, the books, the plays, the art of the moment, as an old man’s rheumatics are by the weather. Take Rene, for instance. Some time ago—and to give her full due, it was the longest spasm she ever had—she accepted the charming winsomeness of Mary Pickford, even to the bewitching curls and simple frocks (no, not the charity school ones). Some film of the must have impressed her, for she was beginning to be quite a draw amongst her acquaintances when she took it into her head to try the vamp touch. The waves were brushed out -and oiled backh and large drop-earrings twinkled wickedly at every movement of her head. The simple frock became a snaky, shining mass of sequins. In her eyes she endeavoured to hold all the subtleties and mysteries of Pola Negri—and failed. Rene has yet to learn that real types are born, not made. In her outlook she adopts any phase of the moment, and hops from one to the other with equal facility and instability. Fr.om being an ardent advocate of women’s place being in the home, she oscillates to women’s emancipation, emphasizing each mood -with appropriate clothes and gestures. She has the artistic pose, with its accompanying aesthetic gown and ethereal look one day, and the next fiinds her in a jaunty, perky suit, racing th? wind in a trim little roadster, knowing its mechanism from screw to cylinder. She may be popular—generally is—her amazing versatility demands it, but she must not be surprised when, on the shady side of thirty, she finds her string of admirers deserting her, and she* looks like ploughing a lonely furrow.

The chameleon girl may be entertaining for a time, may lack nothing in courage, but her posing and posturing soon cease to attract, and when it comes to a question of marriage—well, after all, a man does like to know what he is marrying.