The Champagne Standard

by Mrs. John Lane

If she fascinates the weak-minded man who idly turns the leaves of the fashion-book, it is in spite of herself. When she stands confessed in, say, corsets—an attitude which must be trying in the cold eye of the public—she does not look embarrassed, she only looks dignified. She is, in fact, the direct modern descendant of the Vestal Virgins who sacrificed their beauty to religion, only she sacrifices her beauty to business. The comfort for a tired man to come home to her placid, well-dressed society! That she never loses her temper her exquisitely dressed head amply proves, for you can't lose your temper and preserve the serenity of your back hair! The rapture of a man and a father to come home to his perfectly dressed, silent infant which smiles sweetly from the latest thing in lace cribs, while She bends over him in a toilette which expresses as nothing else can maternal solicitude combined with perfect taste.

Then to see her play tennis, unflushed, unruffled, with her adorable hair still intact; skipping with such ladylike activity, and always smiling. What rapture for a loving man! The delight of golfing with her and her numerous sisters—such a family resemblance!—unexcited, ladylike, the linen collar about her swan like throat never wilted, but a monument to some celestial laundress, and delivering her strokes into the landscape with that inconsequential feebleness which men love, say what they will.

Then, too, to see her listening, in full dress, to the touching strains of the pianola, as performed by a soul-inspired being in the last thing in party frocks and a flower-crowned coiffure, is a study of controlled emotion. She is moved, but too much emotion might ruffle what the poetry of commerce has so sweetly named her "transformation." So she controls her feelings, and looks with calm and thoughtful eyes at the back of the "artiste's" marvellous toilette, and possibly wonders, to the strains of the "Largo" of Händel, how she got into her "creation." But that is a dead and awful secret only known to Mr. Harrod or possibly to Messrs. Derry and Toms.

How many a time have I watched her in a paper-garden-party mingling with other lovely beings of her own sex, for her sense of propriety never allows her to mingle with those gallant gentlemen in frock-coats and evening dress we admire in the tailors' windows. The landscape is—if I may say so—of a most ladylike nature. Mud is absent, for the fair beings meander about in a landscape which nature has apparently cleaned with a tooth-brush. I suppose their need for amusement is amply satisfied with staring at their lovely sisters or offering them fans or bouquets—for I have rarely seen them do anything else, though once the artist who portrayed them became dramatic, and introduced two young things of their kind playing at battledore and shuttlecock in the background.

The greatest innovation was when She was pictured as pouring tea in a baronial hall. The exquisite grace with which she "poured" was a lesson, though I had a terrible doubt as to whether there was anything in that perfect teapot. She wore a tea-gown which was the last "cry" in fluffiness, and the friends about her were gorgeous, in attitudes which did more justice to their toilettes than their manners, for the way they turned their flat backs on each other might, in other society, have given offence. Another innovation in the picture was a perfect footman, a perfect page-boy, and a perfect butler, a noble being like an Archbishop, but much more serious. It was well that no other mere man was present even on paper, for the combination of loveliness was overpowering.

Ah, yes, indeed, if the usual run of mothers and wives were like these, then would there need to be no outcry against the selfish bachelor who refuses to marry. Instead, the bachelor in his five hundred horse-power motor, defying speed limit, palpitating with eagerness, would fly to lay himself at her exquisitely shod feet. For what does man care for beauty unadorned! As for intellect, well, intellect has never been in it!

I am quite sure that neither Mr. Whiteley, nor Mr. Harrod, nor the rest of the public-spirited gentlemen, whose only object in life is to make us beautiful, know what harm they are doing; or why do they portray a race of women to whose perfections mortal women must ever vainly aspire.

Your lovely syrens with their divine legs—there, the awful word is out!—never go shopping through the mud in the early morning! When they wear a dress it is called a "creation," and it is certainly not the year before last's best in reduced circumstances. When they lift their elegant robes, and show their sumptuous frills, it proves that they know nothing of the depravity of "model" laundries. Nor do I for a moment believe that their smiling babies—the smile inherited from their mother, sweet, but slightly vacant—know the agonies of teeth, nettle-rash or colic.

In fact, I refuse to believe that such perfect loveliness can exist. It is a poet's dream, evolved by those worthy gentlemen who only make life a greater trial for us by sending us quarterly reminders of what we ought to be, but what most of us are not. It is a crime to introduce into the bosom of contented families such presentments of too lovely women. Man is weak, and when the wife of his heart comes home from shopping with her hat on one side, by accident, not coquetry, her ostrich plume limp and lank from a battle with the rain, a rent for the convenience of her nose, her chaussures caked with mud to match her petticoats, and on her face an expression which is not bland as she hears shrieks proclaiming colic, how can he help but make sorrowful comparisons with a vision in his mind of a silent infant in a lace-smothered crib that smiles at him from Messrs. Dickins and Jones's alluring book?

Then is the harm done; the weak father falls a victim to his ideal, and his heart turns from his distracted, bedraggled wife to that lovely vision who entered a happy home through the innocent letter-box to the eternal destruction of its domestic peace. Thus "home," once the bulwark of the British nation, is rapidly becoming a mere mockery.