The Champagne Standard

by Mrs. John Lane

There is, however, a destiny for slippers as well as other things, and there is a certain slipper, long and slender, with arched instep and Louis XV heel which, so instinct tells us, is inevitably destined to belong to a lady with a past. Virtue never wears anything so subtle nor so pretty, for, indeed, it is only conscious rectitude that dares to dispense with coquetry, and wears her boots boldly down at the heel.

Given a woman's shoe, and one can easily evolve out of it her entire emotional history, just as a naturalist reconstructs from a bone the entire animal to which it once belonged. Not long ago I saw a famous German actress as Beata in Sudermann's play "The Joy of Living." It is a fine melodramatic part. She has a lover and a husband—familiar combination—but the sin is in the past, and they have all three reached that comfortable middle age when people are supposed to know better.

Unfortunately at the eleventh hour the husband discovers the secret of his wife's old faithlessness and his best friend's treachery. At a dinner in the last act Beata drinks a toast to "The Joy of Living," and promptly solves the riddle of existence by staggering into the next room and poisoning herself. It was as she staggered away that the German actress deprived me of all my illusions for, as she lifted her dress rather high in her anguish, she exhibited a pair of broad, flat boots, with patent leather tips, and the kind of heels only virtue wears, broad and flat and low. I thought I saw side elastics, but that may have been the effect of a perturbed vision.

However, from that moment I lost all belief in Beata's trials. A woman with such boots never takes her own life, never has a lover, never has a past, but she has a good sensible husband who falls asleep after dinner, and while he snores she knits him golf stockings. The audience was under the impression that Beata had killed herself in the next room, but I knew better. No, those feet were not made for tragedy, even Sudermann's art could not convince me, and so a pair of German boots spoiled my illusions.

It is not often that we poor philistines have the privilege of studying at close range the lady who may be truly described as the pet of the stage, and when we do so we owe it entirely to our kind dramatists; and find however much she and her sisters may differ in the details of their interesting careers, they have in common the transcendent charms of their toilettes and the fascination of their slippers.

When one sees how uninteresting the play would be without her, how often virtue is rather fatiguing and not nearly so well dressed, and how the dramatist gives his favourite the most interesting talk and the most dramatic situations, one realises her importance, and that she is quite indispensable to the stage, whatever she is in real life. One only regrets, when society is a little fatiguing, that she is not occasionally permitted to pass through in her gorgeous toilette and her immoral slippers, and that bewitching side glance which one only sees on the stage, just to make society, like the stage, a little more thrilling.

Now in the days of the older dramatists when much was left to what in this material age is fast dying out, that is the imagination, if the dungeon of Lord de Smyth was wanted, the scene-painter nailed up a sign-post with the simple notice, "This is the Dungeon of Lord de Smyth," and the audience were as much thrilled as if they could hear the clanking of the fetters.

In these days we refuse to take our dungeons so absolutely on faith, and, still, if we see a too beautiful creature in red hair (fascinating crime always has red hair), gorgeous clothes, and slippers with Louis XV heels—that estimable monarch was responsible for so much sinfulness combined with singular good taste—and an opera cloak all lace and allurement, the kind for which virtue has neither the money nor the taste, then we can settle down to a good three hours' thrill, for those perfect garments are as much an indication of the dramatist's intentions as in less sophisticated days the sign-post which announced the dungeon of the de Smyths.

We have learnt by experience that certain kinds of clothes always come to a bad end, though never until the fifth act; while virtue, without any nice clothes to comfort her, has a very bad time for at least four acts and a half. One could wish the dramatists would give virtue a better chance!

A very charming woman regretfully confessed to me that the old proverb, that virtue is its own reward, is distinctly discouraging. She felt, with a perfectly blameless existence behind her, that she had a right to demand of fate jewels more precious than imitation pearls, and a mode of transit more patrician than a 'bus or the "tube," or a four-wheeler on state occasions. Her bitterness was enhanced by a picture in the "tube-lift" of a lovely creature ablaze with diamonds, who advertises a firm of philanthropists from whom one can get one's Koh-i-noors on the instalment plan.