Plain Women.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXII, Issue XII, 19 March 1904, Page 62

Plain Women.

There are many types of feminine beauty, and even a type that is not attractive, and that repels while it attracts. "There are,” says a I'rencn writer, 'beautiful Howes that are scentless, an*i beautiful women who are unlovable.” There are also beauties who are even less than skin deep—society ladies and 'tage ladies, who are apt at slight notice to come to pieces. "Fine feathers make fine birds,” and false hair and paint sometimes create a dazzling beauty that is quite undistinguishable from the real article—if seen in the right light. On the other hand, some women seem to take a kind of pleasure in lessening as much as possible the good looks with which nature has endowed them. Athletic women sometimes make themselves unnecessarily unfeminine, and if 1 may com a word, unbeautiful. You have *nly to look ar a photograph of the champion golf team or the champion hockey team, to feel if you value your feminine supremacy that you will for ever eschew both games. I think, quite apart from the necessary "useful clothes,” that there is an ’unnecessary want of femininity sometimes about these man-despising, athletic girls. Please note that I say ‘’sometimes,” for I have known athletes to be exceedingly attractive. It is the women who affect to despise men who are the least lovely as a rule, although why because a woman has a grievance against men she should deprive herself of one of the rights after which she is striving, by making her appearance as unpleasing as possible, is more than 1 can understand. I often think naturally plain women are notoriously generous about their more beautiful sisters. "It’s awfully hard luck,” said a plain girl to me the other day, “awfully hard luck that Mollie (Mollie is a pretty cousin) should get all the attention. Everybody is nice to her, and she gets her own way in everything. i wish she had my carroty hair and my nose,” she added, half viciously, and then laughed good-naturedly—plain girls are generally good-natured—and a,..,... a cheerily, “not mat I grudge it her, because she is such a darling, isn’t she?” As a matter of act, Mollie the beautiful, with her tip-tnted nose, her soft little dimpled face, is by nature far less of a “darling” than the carroty-haired cousin, with whom to judge by deceitful, deceptive outward appearances, it seems impossible to associate such a term. But such, alas' is the prejudice of human nature that is so deftly led astray by sight and sound.