MODERN YOUNG MAN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19048, 27 June 1924, Page 2

MODERN YOUNG MAN

SO SELF-ASSURED HE GRATES. When I was a young man there used to be a lot of talk about the younger generation knocking at the door. But now, it seems to me, the younger generation doesn’t trouble to knock. As a rule, it hasn’t time to come to Lhe house at all. It rings you up on the telephone. Or buttonholes you in the street, and invites you to lunch at its club before it has got your name right (writes Edwin Pugh in the London Daily Mail). Perhaps you think I am a wee bit hard on the modern young man Well, I am—at this moment. I am always hard on him when I am not in his company. It’s the only chance I get. Seems to me that the young man wouldn’t matter so much if he could only be brought to realise that the world was here before he came. He would be rather a nice boy then. But usually he is so dissatisfied with the way Nature docs things that he wants to improve on them. He thinks that Nature doesn’t know enough, that she is too slow and old-fashioned. He thinks he was born to set right her mistakes.

And he includes me among those mistakes. And personally 1 could stand that pretty well, for I am longsuffering and docile as a blind kitten. But then he has a habit of going about and explaining mo to other people. And I don’t want to be explained. I don’t think any explanation of me is necessary. ’

Ah, well! It’s an unsatisfactory world, but it is not entirely the younger generation that makes it so. It’s a hard world. But you musn’t expect to soften it by using your head as a battering-ram. You only soften your head that way. Though it is perhaps better to soften your head than to harden your heart. And then there’s the modern young woman!

Do you remember the old maiden aunt of your childhood? Well, she is dead. She is very dead indeed. You never see the like of her nowadays. Nowadays women are not young women at all until they are thirty or so. They are "girls up to then. And even at forty they have often a girlish laugh. Indeed, the older they get the more girlish they get. At seventeen rhe mere chit who has just bobbed her hair knows much more about men than her mother does. More than the men know about themselves. More than there is to know, perhaps. They will chaff their father’s oldest friends and flirt with their mother’s oldest sweethearts as if the day before yesterday were ten years ago. Thy will talk among themselves about themselves as if the eternal feminine (or whatever else they call it these days) were a brand new idea.

At twenty they say that they will never tie themselves up to any mere man, not realising that some day they may remember and regret how they used to tell the truth by accident. By that time they will be seventeen again. Sweet seventeen and twenty! In the old days it was different. Girls grew up into women then, and women became either wives, and mothers or old maids. Sometimes, maybe, the old maids were not quite sure that they were old maids yet; but they were the only ones who hadn’t long since made up their minds about that. Now the modern Young woman has made up her nrnd "about everything long before she has altered her dresses to the prescribed shortness. And it is not the kind of a wow. she is, but that she should ba a won an at all that puzzles me.