So devitalised and neurasthenic are many of our pretty young girls, that their flowerlike faces, topping over-tall and undeveloped bodies, suggest delicate blossoms crowning long attenuated, sapless stems. Neither faces nor bodies are vitalised and athrill with powers rooted in healthful organs; vivified by healthful functions, and instinct with warm, iron-rich, magnetic blood. They show that making for beauty which is inherent in the Woman-traits, but which, in latter-day girls, owing to defective constitutional vigour or to educational, social or industrial exhaustion, has been able to realise itself only in sickly and weed-like development.
Life manifests in these neurotics in the form of vivacities merely; not as vitalities.
Severed from their natural roots in Life and vital function, they resemble nothing more than charming cut-blossoms gracefully fading on drawing-room shelves.
The truth is that girls brought up on modern strenuous methods skip the years between 16 and 26. If young and fresh at 16, all at once we find them 26 in constitution and in temperament—a little lean, a little lined, a little wan, a little shrill, a little chill, and only too often more than a little disillusioned and cynical—in a word already passées. Some are, of course, an interesting and attractive 26, but the fresh, warm, vital and beautiful years from 17 to 27, the years of a natural woman's most charming bloom of mind and body, have dropped from their lives, like petals from roses. So that our girls in their 'teens require to hide the ravages of time by every sort of artifice. And at 26 in years, they are approaching the forties in constitution and temperament; are even keen on politics, cards, finance—resorts, pre-eminently, of materialistic middle-age.
This blighting of young womanhood, with loss of youthful bloom and responsiveness, it is that has led to the decadent and demoralising vogue of the Flapper. Since, beyond all things, men seek vital youth and freshness in the other sex, to find it now-a-days, they must seek it in children.
VII
Deplorable are the degenerative processes by way of which those noble natural characteristics of the Woman-sex which Nature has achieved by ages of evolutionary advance may be observed to lapse, and are presently all but obliterated from the woman form and face.
Increasingly the curves straighten; the conflict between straight lines and curves occasioning wrinkles. The jaw squares. The lips lose womanly fullness, sweetness, and their natural colour and texture of rose-leaves; becoming thin and pale and stern. Shadows gather round them, foreshadowing, it may be, a masculine growth of hair. Hair loses lustre and grows sparse, particularly above the brows. The chin loses its feminine softness; rigidity and grimness being substituted. Eyes lose fullness, tenderness, brilliance, and woman's normal melting expression. The glance grows chill, hard, shrewd, direct. Crowsfeet mar the modelled lids. The serene, inspiring woman-brows are furrowed by the permanent frown of eye-strain or of nervous tension. The voice falls flat and metallic, or drops into gruffness and harshness; losing its delicate tuneful inflections, its sympathetic timbre, its joyous quality. The cheeks hollow; the white temples are wrecked.
In the faces of women whose systems are functioning healthfully, a number of exquisite artistries in cellular texture of skin and in tinting appear; the skin beneath the eyes differing from that of the cheeks, that of the brows differing from that of the chin, that above the mouth from that below, and so forth. In women subjected to constitutional strain, all these exquisite artistic differentiations—product of incalculable evolutionary developments—are obliterated; the skin over the whole face becoming of the same grain and hue, as is normal to the male. The body becomes spare and sinewy, or set and spread; its movements heavy and abrupt. And more and more the hidden male emerges from the wreckage. The male right arm, swinging like a pendulum, suggests itself as being the motive-power of the ungraceful mechanism.
With the increasing maleness of physique, male mental proclivities develop; obsessions to wear trousers, to smoke, to stride, to kill, and otherwise to indulge the masculine bent.