The Ideal Girl

Waikato Times, Volume 118, Issue 19762, 18 December 1935, Page 19 (Supplement)

The Ideal Girl

Beverley Nichols’ Views. Here, at random, are a few qualities that I find lovable in women, and a few more that I»find hateful (says Beverley Nichols, writing for an English journal). To me a woman's greatest glory is not her hair but her courage. Women are far braver than men. You have only to consider the magnificent fight which an ugly girl puts up against life to realise the truth of this. In every newspaper, on every hoarding, in every novel, movie and play, the beautiful woman' is extolled. By a sort of mass suggestion women are given to understand that if they are not beautiful they are nothing. “It is a woman's duty to be beautiful,” screams the modern world in a thousand voices. But—let’s face it—a great many women aren’t at all beautiful. It is to those women that I take off my hat. For they don’t sit about and mope, they don’,t hide their faces in the shadows, they don’t

retreat into themselves. . They make the best of it. They are gay and magnificently light-hearted, in the face of a world that is subtly and perpetually mocking them. All Types of Women. And so, if I ever marry, I shall probably marry somebody whom you would call plain. But it might be just as well if you refrained from doing so in my presence.

However, it all goes a good deal deeper than that, of course. A woman’s courage finds its finest flower in matters which have no concern with looks.

I can imagine marrying of women if they’d have me (which is open to question). Trapeze artists, mannequins, girls who work in florists’, nurses, governesses, daughters of clergymen, barmaids ... in fact, almost anything except an American heiress.

There are only two types of women with whom the thought of marirage is positively repulsive. The first is the “uncertain-coy-aud-hard-to-please” girl, who ought to have died out in the eighties but lingers on with surprising tenacity. The other type of woman whom I couldn’t marry is the type who believes in that odious doctrine, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

, When you have said that about her, you have said everything. I fear that I have given but a dim and shadowy picture of the woman I might marry. If you analyse it, you will find that it is every woman . . . divorced from the two vices which I most hate—dishonesty and cruelty (vices which are, in different forms, just as prevalent in men). But there is one thing which I have left out—the most important thing of all. I could never marry a woman who did not share my belief that the true judge of our little follies and our petty virtues is not to be found among men, and that the partnership which we made in this life would most surely be continued in the life to come.