For brunettes!—but why, in the name of all that is sensible, we asked, should brunettes powder themselves with pale purple? He explained patiently that ladies of a dusky complexion sometimes used it to give their faces that fashionable pallor which is deemed a symptom of a certain blueness of the blood. He had several other shades, too, for other complexions, natural or desired.
We told our censorious walking companion all about this little experience of ours, but it had not the slightest effect on his opinion—you never saw such a hard man to convince. He still persisted that the young lady painted. In fact, he went so far as to describe how they rub the rouge on, spreading it out carefully with a rabbit's foot—for luck, we presume—and then cover it up with powder. Where the devil do these pious fellows get their information, anyway? He was too much for us. We had to let him have the last word.
After all, suppose she does paint—where's the harm? See how healthy and attractive it makes her look. Of course, the thing has to be done skilfully and with judgment. One must display artistic restraint in such matters, and not lay the color on with a palette-knife. Just a nuance, a soupçon, that's all.
Mind you, there is nothing like the real complexion—for one thing, it doesn't rub off on the shoulder of a fellow's coat. But suppose a lady hasn't a complexion which she can afford to display in unadorned splendor, what's she to do about it? She can't very well go out without a complexion, can she? The thing seems hardly decent.
Personally we have never sympathized with the censorious outcry against the more ruddy cosmetics. Why should this particular bit of camouflage be taboo, when so many other forms of it are regarded as permissible or even obligatory? Look at the liberties ladies take with their waist-line, for instance. Sometimes it is up under their shoulder-blades, and a few months later it is so low they are sitting on it. Half the time a man has to look twice to know where to place his arm.
It is true that the added brilliancy imparted to the female countenance by the judicious use of cosmetics constitutes a very formidable weapon against masculine peace of mind. So clearly is this recognized that in Kansas, the home of fearless and advanced legislation, there is a law forbidding the use of rouge by any woman under forty-five years of age. After that age it is felt they are entitled to every possible assistance—barring shot-guns, of course, or other forms of physical violence.
Perhaps it is a realization of the danger to himself that causes the average man to inveigh so furiously against cosmetics. But his attitude is more than a little absurd. He is bound to fall sooner or later, poor chap, and how does it really matter if he falls a bit sooner and a bit harder? Nevertheless, the average man is usually bitterly opposed to his fair friends making themselves still fairer by deftly heightening or counterfeiting the rosy bloom of youth. He is opposed to his own sisters doing it—the mean old thing!—and he frankly rages when he catches his wife at it. Extraordinary how sore hubbies get when they find wifey thus striving to make herself beautiful in their eyes—can it be that they are not quite sure whose eyes?
The deliciously inconsistent part of the whole thing is that no respectable woman ever dreamed of daubing herself up with cosmetics the way the ordinary barber plasters most men with powder and perfumed hair-tonic and toilet dope of all sorts. We have seen fat middle-aged men come out of a barber-shop with their face massaged and powdered, their hair greased back, their mustache waxed, their eyebrows smoothed into place, and their hands manicured, doing their utmost to look and smell like beautiful Circassian slaves. And yet those are the chaps who go home and holler if they catch their wives rubbing a little powder on their noses!
Not that it makes the slightest difference, of course! The ladies, bless their hearts, will go right on making themselves beautiful in every old way they know how, no matter what men say. And you are quite right, girls. Personally we feel that you can't go too far or be too successful. So do your darndest! It's a sad old world just now, in spite of peace with victory.
But there is just one little word of warning, girls. We know you will take it in good part from a man who has grown grey in the intensity of his admiration for you. And that is, don't do it in public. A bachelor, it is true, dearly loves to be initiated into the little mysteries of the toilet, but not at dinner. That talcum powder has an unpleasant way of floating on the soup or the salad dressing. And you can't possibly spread it with the true artistic evenness at the table. You nearly always get too much on one side of your nose. This gives us an almost irresistible impulse to lean over and brush it off for you, and—well, what would the head-waiter think? It would probably cost us five dollars in hush money.