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BEAUTY IN THE BANK

Beauty in the Bank

Somehow we enjoy going to the bank nowadays far more than we used to. It isn't that we are more solvent than heretofore—our solvency does not seem to increase with our years—but the banks are much more interesting resorts than in the old days before the war filled them up with young ladies. The banks now have more color and animation, so to speak—especially since the girls have taken to wearing those gaudy pull-over sweaters.

We were reminded of this changed aspect of our sterner financial institutions the other day, when we caught ourself going in to have our bank-book made up for the third time in the week. Formerly it had been our custom to wait till we got a short and nasty note from the accountant asking us to call around and fix up that overdraught. But now we run right in every time we pass and have a little book-keeping done for us.

Instead of the gloomy young man who used to preside over the records of the savings department, they now have a bright young woman. This naturally introduces a very pleasing social atmosphere. We no longer chuck our bankbook in through the wicket with an air of weary nonchalance, or gaze coldly at the clerk as though daring him to make an insolent remark about the size of our balance and the amount of book-keeping it involves. Our account is still small and very lively, but we don't gaze coldly—on the contrary!

Now we take off our hat, and try to think up something sprightly to say about the weather. If it is a nice day in the summer, for instance, this leads naturally to a discussion of the best place to spend one's vacation, and whether or not one likes sailing, and does one do much dancing in the summer, and how good the roads are for motoring just now.

If it is winter or the weather is bad, it brings one at once to the tragic impossibility of going anywhere or doing anything, and how dull town is just now, and the theatre and the movies—especially the movies! This last is an opening we have found invariably successful. Once you mention Mary Pickford or Francis X. Bushman, acquaintance ripens visibly. Young ladies who turn coldly from almost any other conversational bait rise voraciously to this one, and take it hook, line, and sinker.

A great thing, too, about discussing film-favorites is that it furnishes a most useful index to character. Girls who like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, for instance, are apt to be of the merry, hoydenish sort—fond of romping, you know, and caramels and practical jokes, and all that sort of jolly rot. The admirers of Clara Kimball Young or Mr. Bushman, on the other hand, are usually of the yearning, soulful type, the kind of girl who wants you to recite poetry to her in the twilight, and longs for some strong man to protect her—this sort of thing usually leads to solitaire-diamond rings. But the young ladies who enthuse over Theda Bara and Pauline Frederick—well, when we run across one of these we always look around for help. When one meets an amateur of vamping one had best not get too far from one's strategic reserves.

This conversational gambit, is all right, but the trouble in the banks is that they keep changing the young ladies around. Just as soon as we have got things moving along nicely, and have reached the point where we can talk about the young lady's preferences in the matter of supper, or can throw out general suggestions in the direction of an evening's paddle in the Island lagoon, they remove her to an inaccessible portion of the building—perhaps they confine her in the main vault—and we have to start all over again. It is a little discouraging, even though our heart is in the work. Bank managers and chief accountants certainly seem to be jealous devils.

Business men, too, are an awful nuisance. They have a way of breaking in disastrously on our little tête-à-têtes at the wicket. One day last summer an awfully nice girl was reading a cheque we brought in, while we playfully seized her other hand which she had left carelessly within reach. Naturally she didn't notice that we were holding it—wonderful concentration these business women have! And naturally neither of us was paying much attention to anyone else—not while this particular business matter was being settled.

"Say, what is this?" a wheezy voice asked at our ear. "Is this a bank or have I butted into a manicuring parlor?"

We looked at the person, a fat and clammy merchant with a bunch of colored cheques in his flabby fist, the sort of human hippo who wears a pink shirt with a Palm Beach suit, and perspires on the end of the nose. We looked coldly down him from the gaudy band on his Panama, to the gilded buckle of his belt—everything below that was concealed by the overhang—but we couldn't think of a darn thing to say. Nothing suitable for a bank, that is.

Fortunately the lady was more than equal to the occasion. She raised her eyebrows and looked at the cheques he held.

"Do you want to cash those?" she asked in silvery tones of hauteur.

"I do," he said with unabashed assurance, "if you can spare the time—and a hand."

"Well, then you had better run out and get someone to identify you—perhaps one of the other butchers might be willing."

We could see the ripples of rage run up the back of that fat financier's neck. He turned a rich magenta, and the diamond on his little finger wobbled about as though he were trying to send a distress message by heliograph.

"Where—where's the Manager?" he spluttered. "I want the Manager. I'll report you, that's what I'll do—you—you minx!"

"Second door at the left of the main entrance," she said sweetly, and reached for a ledger. She did not seem flustered in the least, but our little conversazione was over—this sort of interruption makes it so difficult to recapture the first fine careless rapture.

It was our own fault. We shouldn't have gone in at an hour when business men were likely to be shouldering their way up to the financial trough. In order to take advantage of the social possibilities of present-day banking, it is best to call early—say, around ten o'clock. Then the commercial machine has not got properly under way and little flowers of romance may be made to bloom in the arid paths of business.

But, of course, one mustn't go too early. One must give the girls a chance to exchange their little confidences with one another about the sort of time they had the night before, and what canoe club he belongs to, and how many fox-trots she had with him, and what she said to Reggie when Reggie objected to her going around with a former aviator—aviators presumably being men of flighty notions of morality—and the other vital topics that ladies discuss the morning after.

We made that mistake one morning two or three months ago. A fellow had given us a cheque—it was rather a surprise, we admit—and we were quite short of money, which is never a surprise to us. We needed it and we needed it quickly, so we were at the door of his bank just one minute and a half after it opened. We didn't want to give anyone else a chance to beat us to his bank-balance, so we were there at nine-thirty-six-and-a-half.

The young ladies were present all right—most of them, at any rate—but they had not yet turned their minds to the business of the day. About a dozen of them were gathered in chatty little groups, from which stray snatches of conversation reached our ears.

"I think I'd have frills on it, my dear," said one. "You know those net and muslin frills are all the rage. Gertie was over at Buffalo last week, and she said that the girls were wearing them all over."

How "all over?" But another broke in.

"Say, have you girls seen Maud's new Dew-Kist silk skirt?" she burbled. "It's just too sweet. But don't you think Dew-Kist is an awful nuisance?—everything sticks to it, you know. And it gets so fuzzy when it's rubbed."

Dew-Kist!—it certainly was a very pretty name. A Dew-Kist skirt suggested Arcadian gambols about the morning meadows, with singing and laughter and—well, there is no need of leaving all the kissing to the dew. But we decided not to rub one of those skirts—not if it was going to get all fuzzy and give us away like that. We even made a brief mental prayer that the vogue of Dew-Kist silk would be a short one, much as we liked the name.

Then we waited patiently for another five minutes, while the conversation turned lightly to chenille hats and knitted sweaters.

"I am doing mine in old-rose silk," one young lady informed the other girls and the banking public generally, as represented by us. "Wool is getting so common, don't you think? And the silk clings to the figure much better. You don't get that bulkiness around the waist."

Under the circumstances, we were strong for silk, and we were glad to think the girls were taking it up. In fact, we found the whole conversation very pleasant and improving. But we could not help reflecting that our financial purpose in visiting the bank was not being furthered by it, and that the Managing Editor might perhaps be impatient for our presence at the office. Of course, his humor would all depend on what sort of golf he had played the afternoon before, but one mustn't count too confidently on a good score.

So we coughed. We coughed gently at first, and then louder and louder, until finally we were tearing the fur lining out of our throat. A couple of fair bankeresses glanced at us as though we were an obnoxious June-bug. And then one of them—we think it was Claire—sauntered over to us humming one of Al Jolson's newest records. She laid a powder-puff on the desk and stretched a languid hand for our cheque. She read the cheque. She seemed to read it over several times. Then she laid it on the ledger and walked back to the group. An idea had evidently struck her—we thought she was going to call the police.

"Oh, girls," she said, "do you know what that dirty little cat, Edith. … "

We wouldn't have minded so much if we had been able to catch the rest of it, but she lowered her voice, their heads all drew together, and we were left to beat our forehead against the brass grating in impotent rage. We also thumped on the desk with the end of our cane. They heard us—you could hear us two blocks away—but they heeded not.

Finally, the only man in sight came out of the teller's cage—if we worked in a bank these days, we also would wish to be kept in a cage. We would feel much safer that way. He was a comparatively young man but he looked harassed and worn. He came up to the wicket, and we pointed to our cheque—we were too hoarse to speak. He picked it up.

"Say, would some of you ladies kindly consent to attend to this?" he asked in an O-my-gawd tone of voice. It was the voice of a man who had suffered much and saw no relief in sight.

Claire came back, still humming. Her manner indicated that she despised us both. The Paying Teller—at least, that was the name on his cage—went into the big vault in the back of the office. Then he returned.

"Have you changed your combination, Miss Jenkins," he asked curtly, "or do you wish me to do it for you?"

Her combination—great heavens! We gasped and the purple flood of embarrassment mantled our particularly open countenance. But Claire was perfectly cool.

"Thanks," she said without the quiver of an eyelid, "but I want to get used to doing it myself."

She handed us our cheque and then she disappeared into the vault. No wonder they have big iron doors on those things!

KONCERNING KOSMETICS

Koncerning Kosmetics

As a matter of fact—and we are a bear for facts—it should be spelled with a "k." It comes from the Greek "kosmetikos," meaning one skilled in ornament. Honest to heaven, it does! We looked it up in the dictionary; and who are we that we should quarrel with a ten-pound lexicon? As a concession to custom, however, and to the beauty-experts who spell it with a "c," we will so far unbend from our classical austerity as to use the vulgar form "cosmetics" in the present article. The Greeks aren't likely to buy this book, anyway.

In the meantime the reader is probably wondering what in the world should cause us to write about the subject at all. The reader, we hope, is too well aware of our chaste aloofness of soul to suppose for a second that we have perhaps been cavorting about with persons who dye and stencil themselves—God bless us, no! We wouldn't do such a thing, even if the income taxes left us any money to do it with.

To tell the whole truth as simply as possible—and the person who tells the whole truth is obviously very simple—we were walking down to the office the other morning with a good churchman. Oh, a real pillar of ecclesiasticism! Not that we are in the habit of hunting up good churchmen to walk down with, but if we run into one—hang it all! we have to walk with him. We can't very well shout for a policeman.

Well, as we were walking down with him, and he was telling us some pretty little thing or other about something in the Thirty-Nine Articles—not to be confused with the Fifty-Seven, which are much spicier—we met a young lady, another pretty little thing. We meet her quite often. Morning after morning she walks up the street just about the time that we walk down. We don't know her. We don't even speak to her. But she looks sweetly at us, and we regard her in the tenderly paternal way befitting our years. A very nice little girl, indeed, and one of these days we are going to raise our hat, and …

This morning she dimpled daintily as usual, and we felt that soft glow which even the middle-aged can acknowledge without shame. It was pleasant meeting her. It gave a headier zest to the morning air, an additional sparkle to the winter sunshine, a sudden glamor as of green leaves and singing birds amid the bleak trees of December. It was as though old Pan had suddenly blown a few wild notes on his pipes and set a host of little elves peeping roguishly around the posts and porches of that monotonous and respectable street. For a moment we felt quite young and—well, rather devilish, you know.

"Tut, tut, tut," said our religious friend. "My, my, my—too bad, too bad!"

We wondered what the dickens he was tut-tutting about. He couldn't read our thoughts, and in any case they were entirely innocent. So why the tut-tutting? Why should a well-known drygoods merchant with a grown-up family go along making a noise like a sick Ford?

"What's the matter?" we asked. "Have you left something behind you at the house, or have you forgotten to shut off the draught of the furnace? That's the worst of furnaces, you have to be so. … "

But he turned on us an appalled countenance as though he had just caught the rector kissing the president of the Ladies' Auxiliary. Instinctively we felt he was going to say something about our little friend of the dimples. He did.

"She paints!" he gasped. "Isn't it terrible to see a young girl—and rather comely, too, so far as I could observe in passing—paint the way she does?"

The old snooper! And he looked at us in the confident expectation that we would agree with him. We affected to misunderstand him and said that perhaps she did paint badly, and that Cubism and Futurism and the other new movements were playing the very devil with art. Painting wasn't at all what it used to be, and we proceeded to instance two or three men we know who also paint very badly indeed.

"They seem to have lost their sense of tonality and chiaroscuro," we remarked desperately, hoping the technical balderdash would distract his attention. "The vibration seems to have gone out of their paint, and their brush-work is … "

"But she paints herself!" he insisted.

Isn't that characteristic of the truly religious mind? They never miss a thing, those chaps. They seem to know instinctively—at least, we hope it is instinctively—everything that a woman shakes, smears, or pours on herself. They can tell rouge, face-powder, or hair-dye blocks away. If they tried hard they could probably tell you where every woman on the street buys her complexion, her coiffure, and her contours, and how they are put on. It is a great gift. Personally, it takes us years of acquaintance to find out.

We remember once a very churchly young man—the kind that always shows you to a pew and opens the hymn-book at the right place for you—telling us of a musical comedy into which he would seem to have wandered under a misapprehension. We had gone ourself, and it had struck us as being decidedly tame. But he was filled with indignant wonder that the Censor should permit such shameless and Babylonian displays.

"Fortunately I sat at the back of the house," he said, "or I wouldn't have known where to look. One of the girls in the chorus, the second from the right, didn't even wear tights, but danced in her bare legs!"

Great guns! And there we had sat up in Row E on the aisle—the Dramatic Critic let us have the seats that night—and hadn't seen a darn thing. Verily there is some power that sharpeneth the eye of the virtuous man and revealeth unto him the dishabille of the wicked. For an upright heart is more powerful than opera-glasses, and sanctity more exciting than a seat in the front row.

But to return to the young lady we met on our walk down to the office. Naturally we assured our godly friend that he must be mistaken in his suspicions. A little powder, perhaps, to give that pearly translucency to the complexion and soften the high-lights on the nose, but no paint—nothing like that.

"But powder won't make your face that funny shell-pink color," he argued. For a man of pious pursuits, it struck us, his knowledge was fairly broad.

We told him that powder was liable to make your face any shade in the spectrum. We know from personal experience. Occasionally after shaving, when our face feels more than usually lacerated, we rub some talcum on. It seems to take part of the sting out. It also covers the places on our neck where we have made futile and fumbling slashes at our jugular vein.

One morning we shook some powder out of a new tin, patted ourself with it, and then hurried down to breakfast. Our landlady looked at us with an interest and sympathy that were entirely unexpected and a little disquieting.

"Are you feeling well?" she asked, instead of demanding acrimoniously as usual what under heaven we had been doing upstairs for the last half hour or so, while the coffee was boiling itself to a poisonous consistency on the back of the stove.

We said we were perfectly all right, thanks, and would she please pass the prunes?

"But you don't look well," she persisted. "You got an awfully queer color this morning—kind of mauve."

A vague suspicion struck us that all was not well. We went over to the side-board and squinted at ourself in the silly little mirror which furniture-makers put in the back of such things. "Mauve" was right, though perhaps it would be more exact to state that we were a lovely shade of heliotrope, very decorative but rather Futurist in general effect. We looked as if we had succeeded in cutting our throat at last, and were now a pale and beautiful corpse. We suddenly recalled that our heart had been acting a little strangely of late, especially when we were introduced to new and pretty girls. Perhaps there really was something wrong with our old carburetor—or should we say our ignition system? We were scared a still paler shade of lavender.

Then we remembered the powder—somehow it hadn't seemed quite the same as the old stuff, though we had been in too much of a hurry to look closely at it. We ran upstairs and shook some of it out in our hand—it was a pretty and quite distinct violet, both as to color and perfume. Naturally there is no serious objection to smelling like a violet, but we had no ambition to have a complexion like one—we prefer that the resemblance should be confined to the beautiful modesty of our disposition.

We took the tin back to our druggist on the way down-town, and asked him with some asperity what the big idea was. We assured him that we hadn't bought the powder as part of the make-up to play the leading role at a wake, and that even in the event of our being laid out we didn't intend the dash of lavender to be so brazenly conspicuous—a little purple on our tie, perhaps, but none on our countenance.

"Oh, that's too bad," he said calmly—druggists are always calm—"I must have given you the powder for brunettes by mistake."

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.

CLURKS AND CLARKS

Clurks and Clarks

The chief difference between a "clurk" and a "clark" is about six dollars a week—the difference, that is, in mere vulgar coin of the post-war period. There are tremendous differences, however, in clothes, dignity, savoir faire, and such intangible things. There is also a very pronounced difference between the kinds of service they give you. A mere "clurk" may keep you waiting, but he or she never manages to make you feel apologetic. "Clarks" always do—it is their social privilege.

It is at the blessed season of Christmas that we are especially reminded of these things. It is a time when we are much exposed to clerks—"clerks" being the generic term. We consort—not to say cohabit—with both species. If hanging over a counter for hours at a time, yelling futile directions at a monomaniac who insists on dragging down everything on the shelves except the thing one wants—if this doesn't amount to cohabitation, we would like to know what does. But, of course, there is something to be said in extenuation for the clerks.

Some day when we are a lot older and have made our pile, and have the whole four hundred and sixty dollars salted away carefully in some nice safe mining-stock—some day, in short, when we are independently rich and careless of what we say, we will write down our frank and unexpurgated opinion of Christmas shoppers, and then spend the rest of our life trying to induce some paper to print it. But that is a long way off yet. For the present we will compromise with the simple generalization that the average Christmas shopper is a lineal and typical descendant of such Gadarenes as managed to swim to safety after they had taken that historic jump off the cliff.

We feel that it is only fair to make this statement before we go on writing about the Christmas "clurk" and the Christmas "clark." For the Christmas shopper explains many things. To have to stand for ten, twelve, perhaps fifteen hours a day, while a lot of people, who have gone insane from starting in to do their Christmas shopping early and keeping at it without intermission ever since, howl impossible orders at one, would make the patient man of Uz himself pick up a bolt of dress-goods or a reading-lamp or some such handy trifle and clear a breathing space with it. Samson used the jaw-bone of an ass. But the asses who wedge themselves up against counters and scream at the clerk for things that are sold either two floors up or three circles over, keep their jaw-bones to jaw with.

The movement in favor of doing your Christmas shopping early is no solution of the problem. It has been worked to death. If you want to get ahead of the Christmas shoppers now, you have to start in the latter part of August. In that case your Christmas presents are likely to consist of lawn-mowers, mosquito netting, and parasols.

As a matter of fact, the wise man will do his shopping—unless he is so darn wise that he doesn't shop at all—the very last thing on Christmas Eve. By then all the red-eyed shock-troops will have got through their deadly work in the stores, and will be strapped to their beds surrounded by anxious nurses. A week earlier an ordinary man who plunged into a department-store at any hour of the day would take his life in his hand—along with his eighty-seven cents. If he managed to get through alive, he wouldn't have enough clothes left on him to make it safe to meet a modest policeman.

Another advantage of putting off your Christmas shopping is that you are bound to forget a lot of people to whom you would otherwise have sent a collection of assorted junk. Of course, it is too late by the time you do think of them. You are just that much in pocket, and they are relieved because they won't have to send you anything next year.

But, to return to the clerks, we had a simply awful experience last Christmas. There is a nice old lady for whom we buy a present every year. As she isn't our grandmother—grandmothers are satisfied with any old token of affectionate regard whether it be a postcard or a hot-water bottle—we have to exercise a certain care and judgment. And naturally our knowledge of the personal needs and tastes of old ladies is somewhat limited.

Well, we were standing deep in thought before a shop-window full of fluffy white garments with frills and ribbons, intended for purposes mysterious to bachelor men, when a friend's wife, who occasionally takes a maternal—or perhaps we should say sororal—interest in us, came up and asked us what we were doing there. Her tone suggested that she did not believe our interest to be entirely innocent. But we did not take offence. We told her frankly that we were trying to pick out something that would be suitable as a gift for an old lady.

"But you don't suppose, do you, that a nice old lady would be willing to wear anything in that window?" she asked.

We said we didn't see why not, and that personally we thought that cute-looking garment up there in the corner, with the baby ribbon at the top and the two ruffles around the bottoms, would be just the thing. We spoke in complete guilelessness, but we spent the next ten minutes trying to convince her that we hadn't intended to be objectionable. Will someone please tell us why it isn't all right to talk about a thing that it is all right to display brazenly in a window? If it isn't fit to be mentioned it surely isn't fit to be shown. But you know what women are when they get an idea of that sort in their minds. This one looked us sternly in the eye.

"I don't believe there is any old lady at all," she said, "but if there is and you really want to buy her a present that won't cause her to write and complain to your family when she gets it, why not buy her a hug-me-tight?"

A hug-me-tight!—now that sounded like the very last thing we would have nerve enough to send a lady, no matter how old she was. Besides, we didn't know that a hug-me-tight was a thing one could send. We thought it was something one did. But we are always ready to learn, especially about things that have to do with hugging, figuratively or otherwise—and the more figuratively the better. But, of course, a good deal depends on the figure. So we got a few more directions, and then we walked right into that department-store and accosted a tall superior person in a morning-coat.

"Where do they sell hug-me-tights?" we asked.

"What's that?" he barked at us, in a manner which would have been offensive in anyone but a real silver-mounted "clark."

"A hug-me-tight," we repeated with emphasis, "a woolly business used by old ladies to protect the chest and back against draughts—the kind that come through the window, not out of a bottle."

We thought to cheer him up with this little touch about the "draughts"—mild, you know, but still a pun. Somehow he didn't seem to like it. Perhaps he didn't get it—these toffs often don't. Stately, you know, but a little slow.

"Woollen goods—third floor!" he finally grunted.

His manner was not of the sort to inspire much confidence, but we took his word—also the elevator. And when we say that we "took" the elevator, we mean that we fought our way into it through an army of maddened suffragettes. We bit the ends off two feathers; we were stabbed in several places with hat-pins; and finally at the third floor we were disgorged into the woolliest woollen department we have ever seen. It was full of woolly garments—some of a most embarrassingly intimate description—and ladies. There wasn't a man in sight. It was rather trying for us. There was on view a great deal of raiment of the sort that is "knit to fit," and—well, it has always seemed to us that there is something rather gross about wool. Now muslin—especially if complicated with lace and insertion—is filmy and charmingly illusive. But wool—no!

We picked out a plump little clerk-lady with woolly hair and brown eyes. We don't know why we picked her out particularly, except that she was the sort of girl we would naturally pick out. She seemed a young person who would know about hug-me-tights. So we went right up to her and—remembering just in time not to take off our hat as if she were a "ladifren" of ours—we asked her as casually as the nature of the case would permit where we could get a hug-me-tight.

"A hug-me-tight—you want a hug-me-tight? You—you?" and the shameless little huzzy buried her face in a pair of blankets with blue borders and bleated convulsively.

We moved on—with dignity, but hurriedly. It was a painful thing to have happen. There are dissolute and daring characters who would perhaps have enjoyed the situation. They might even have taken occasion from it to enter into conversation and find out the young lady's Christian name—if Christian—and whether or not she liked movie-shows. But ours is a mind above such trivial manoeuvres. We moved on, while a clammy perspiration bedewed our brow.

The next time we picked out the oldest and homeliest clerk we could see in that department. Taking courage from the thought that here was a woman who could not possibly put any personal significance into a request for a hug-me-tight, we went up to her and told her we wanted one. Involuntarily we lowered our voice till it was little above a whisper. Too late we realized our mistake. She gave us one horrified glance, and then, no doubt, recalling all the terrible stories she had read of young and pretty girls being "loored" to "roon" and never heard of more, she turned to cry for help. But we stopped her short.

"Madam," we said sternly, "the hug-me-tight referred to is a nice garment for a woolly old lady—no, no, a woolly garment for a nice old lady—and the sole motive in asking you for it is the hope that you might direct——"

"Three circles to the left!" she snapped in a sour tone, which for a wild moment suggested that she was disappointed. But we would hate to think that—at her age, too!

It was fully ten minutes before we could nerve ourself sufficiently to go to that third circle. Instead, we went over and looked at a lot of assorted mittens for children. We gazed at them with an intensity that must have given the young lady behind the counter the impression that we were the father of at least ten children—all small.

We even got a silly notion of buying a pair of them for the old lady—she has rather small hands. And there was a nice pair of red ones on a tape. Whenever she went out in the back-yard to make snowballs—but we decided against it. We were told to get a hug-me-tight; and a hug-me-tight we were resolved to get, even if they sent in a hurry-up call for the Morality Squad.

By this time, however, we were aware that a hug-me-tight was not a thing for a nervous man to ask a young lady for, without preparing her mind gently. We have always believed that we have a spiritual face—the grave, sweet expression of a monk who is happy in his calling. But any healthy man who says he can look spiritual while asking a lady-clerk for a hug-me-tight is a liar. We hate to be vulgar, but no other word will do. The thing isn't possible—that's all. So we were politic.

"Have you any woollen garments, something in the nature of a jacket," we asked in our most elaborately casual tone, while the blond person patted her hair and stared negligently past our right ear, "which would be suitable for an elderly lady to wear in the house or under a coat?"

"Oh, what you want is a hug-me-tight," she said.

And she never batted an eye! The self-control of women at times is really a wonderful thing. So we got our hug-me-tight at last. But never again—s'elp us! We'll get that nice old lady a meerschaum pipe first.

VENTILATION

Ventilation

This is the season of the year—we are writing on a fine brisk December day, friend reader—when ventilation becomes one of the paramount issues. To open the window or not to open it, that is the question. Discussions on this topic have been known to split families. They have even led to the splitting of heads.

Heaven only knows how many divorces have been started by arguments as to how much air should be let into the bedroom o' nights—with the number of blankets and the thickness of the eiderdown as sub-headings of debate.

Consider the sad lot of the ordinary poor anæmic husband married to one of those hardy modern women, who are so full-blooded that they can't bear to wear anything to speak of above the corset-top or below the knees. We saw one on the street the other day, and about the only difference between her and "September Morn" was a sealskin coat thrown back on the shoulders, and the fact that she didn't stand the same way as the lady in the picture. It was a cold day, too.

Naturally persons of such airy inclinations and fervid temperament wouldn't want to be burdened with a whole lot of blankets and quilts when they go by-by. Obviously you can't take a really truly "beauty sleep" with several layers of bed-clothes piled up on you like the roof of a dug-out. The thing isn't done—not in any pictures that we have seen, that is. As a pious and embarrassed bachelor, of course, we speak of such matters purely from report and from such evidences as we have gleaned from the movies and from those bed-room scenes now so popular in stage-performances. Stage-beds never have any blankets. Their appointments always are of pink silk, and no conscientious actress would dream of pulling them up any higher than the lace-work on her nighty.

But consider the case of the modern husband. He, poor devil, is not hardened by going around the streets with his shirt laid open so as to expose everything from his collar-bone to his solar-plexus. Also his pants are of wool—or so the tailor claims—and they extend to his feet. If they were made of georgette (we got this from a department-store "ad") and cut off at the knee so as to display about three dollars' worth of transparent silk stocking, they might help to harden his constitution—also his nerve. But, as a matter of fact, he would probably get double pneumonia while the first policeman he met was dragging him off to the station. If he didn't get double pneumonia, he would certainly get three months.

Naturally such a man is soft and sensitive to cold. If he lets any draught into his room at night, he wants a nice, tame little draught that will coil up quietly under the dresser and stay there. His wife on the other hand, accustomed to the rigors of the open street with hardly any other defence than her natural beauty, insists on letting into the room one of those northern zephyrs that play about exposed street-corners in the month of January. That is where the trouble starts, and—well, when we finally get a divorce court in Canada, this will probably be regarded as one of the statutory causes.

Of course, it isn't only a man's wife that drives him into nightly cold storage. There is the pressure of public opinion, for instance. The same absurd force of custom which drags a man out of bed in the morning, blue and shivering, and plunges him into a tub full of icy water, directs that he shall leave his window open all night for fear of what the neighbors would think of him if he didn't.

We are a coward like everyone else, and we do it. We don't believe the health-hints we see in the magazines. We have no wife to bully us in the matter of the aeration of our boudoir. And yet we cower miserably under the clothes all winter long, while icy gales leap in through the window, chucking our garments off the chair where we pile them up, blowing the undress portraits of our favorite characters in ancient history, Helen of Troy, Venus, and Phryne, about the room, and reaching under the clothes to tickle our feet with icicles.

It isn't good for us. It isn't good for any man to spend the night with his head under the pillow instead of on top of it. But what are we to do about it? We don't dare keep our window closed—what would our landlady say, if she found out? She'd probably decide we had measles, and throw us out to prevent the house being quarantined.

And next morning! Great guns, but that room is cold! It would be just about right for a little Esquimau, but we are not a little Esquimau. We don't rub ourself all over with train-oil or whale-blubber. We don't even know how to induce a whale to blubber on us. Neither do we sleep in fur pyjamas, which also serve for business and social purposes. Little Esquimaus don't even have to put their hats on when they get up. They are all dressed as it is.

The terrible predicament of a civilized man dressing in a cold room is that he has to take off what little he has on before he can put on anything else. One's flannelette nighty may be no great shakes as a protection, but at least one has been able to warm it up a little during the night. And then to take it off, while your teeth chatter and your blood congeals—there are few sadder partings than this.

One's only safety lies in speed. If you could only see us as we leap—oh, with a chaperon, of course, dearie—no, no, we don't mean that we leap with a chaperon, but that it would be all right for you to see us if you brought a chaperon—oh, well, anyway, we certainly leap.

But it must be admitted that civilized male habiliments are not adapted to speedy dressing. Neither are female, for that matter, judging by the length of time we have to wait whenever we take anyone to the theatre. If they would only devise some sort of clothes—for the winter months, at any rate—that a man could jump into and fasten with one or two buttons! You know how a firehorse runs into his harness. Well, something along that line would do.

As it is, we drop our robe de nuit like Psyche at the bath—only a little more hurriedly, perhaps—and then we start a deadly wrestle with a set of underwear which has deliberately tied itself up in a series of fancy knots. Our feet stick halfway in, and we stagger about on one foot dragging and moaning, while our epidermis assumes all the colors of a sick chameleon. It is a very painful predicament, mortifying to one's sense of dignity, and hurtful to one's eternal salvation because of the expletives one is sometimes led to blurt out.

And then think of the complication of hose-supports, suspenders, collars and ties, and all the rest of it. Besides, you have probably forgotten to put buttons in a clean shirt the night before, and you have to stand there with palsied fingers babbling in imbecile rage while the studs roll gaily under the bureau. No wonder a man comes down to his breakfast on cold mornings with a seething rage that would make a Prussian hate-party look like a June day in the pigeon-loft.

Who started this ventilation racket, anyway? Our grandfathers had no use for it, Heaven knows. Personally we can recall our paternal grandparent, armed with a large, strong kitchen-knife, shoving gobs of cotton-batting into the cracks around the double-windows, in case a skinny little draught should be able to worm its way in somewhere. And yet the old gentleman was not cut off prematurely by some wasting disease. He celebrated, on the contrary, a very merry ninety-fourth birthday before he went aloft to poke cotton-batting cloudlets, no doubt, into the crevices in the pearly panes of heaven.

We have also known a lot of other vigorous old people who had about as much use for ventilation as they had for a velocipede. Of course, this sort of talk from us sounds very reactionary and benighted and all that, but we can't help recalling that people seemed to live longer and more comfortably in the good old stuffy days than they do now, when a man is a small body of chills entirely surrounded by draughts. Perhaps some brother or sister will rise up in meeting and explain this little matter to us.

Air, fresh air—everyone seems to be shouting for it as though they were Huns caught in a foundered submarine. But old-fashioned business men used to do their work in hermetically sealed offices containing a wood-stove that made the varnish smoke on the furniture. If anyone opened the door wide enough to let in a draught the size of a lead-pencil, they swore at him. And as for opening the windows—only over their dead bodies, that's all! Besides, they were usually nailed down till the next spring.

But your modern business man's ideal seems to be an office that is about as weather-proof as a squirrel-cage. We called on a man the other day, and he was sitting between two wide-open windows with a gale blowing through them that nearly shot us back down the stairs again.

"Great, isn't it?" the Arctic idiot chortled. "Nothing like good fresh air! Keeps up your efficiency, you know, puts pep into you."

We said that obviously a man would have to keep moving if he wanted to save himself from freezing to death in that office. But where did his customers get off? It might be all right for him to freeze out a poor devil of a journalist like ourself, but how about freezing out a pork-packer or a bank-president? Not that we have any painful objection to seeing them frozen, God Wot—we have been frozen out of banks too often ourself.

"Oh, a man's customers come in off the street," he said breezily, "and they're usually wearing their street-clothes, so they're all right."

We took the tip. We buttoned our overcoat, turned up our collar, pulled our hat well down on our head, drew on our gloves, hunched up our back, and were able to talk to him for three minutes about as comfortably as though we were sitting on the top ledge of a sky-scraper in a blizzard. If there's anything we hate, it is a draught in the ear. The only draught we don't object to is the sort that one gets out of a keg, and naturally one doesn't get it in the ear—not unless the party has been going on a long time.

Take our own office. The window swings on a central pivot. The beauty of this system is that you can get more air this way in a shorter time than by any other expedient short of removing the side wall. But you can't get just a little air. Either you don't get any at all, or you get a tornado that lifts you out of your seat by the back-hair.

Of course, the system has one advantage—you can aim the draught. By setting the window at the correct angle, you can switch an aerial Niagara into the next office, from which it comes back slightly warmed up and as a rule highly flavored with cigarette smoke and profanity. This vicarious ventilation, so to speak, has its advantages, but it is apt to lead to reprisals—and not always in kind. Some son of a gun, for instance, slipped into our office this afternoon and stole all our matches. We know they weren't blown away, for they were in a drawer.

While we feel keenly on this subject of ventilation and believe that the thing is being greatly overdone, we don't wish to write ourself down as entirely opposed to fresh air. Some concessions must be made to the popular hygiene of the day. All that we ask for is reasonable moderation. We don't mind a nice little draught slipping into the room from time to time, so long as it comes in quietly and unnoticeably. What we hate is the sort of draught that leaps at the back of our neck and shoves an icy mitt down our collar.

Personally, we look forward to the time—will the reader please excuse us for a moment? The chap in the office next door has just opened his pivot window again, and has blown our hat, ten pages of this manuscript, a dollar bill, and seventeen cents' worth of postage stamps down the corridor. We are going in to speak to him about it.

(We are taking a paper-weight with us).