How Women are ruined by Art.

Mr. Anstey tells a story of a young barber who fell in love with his own wax model.  All day he dreamed of the impossible.  She—the young lady of wax-like complexion, with her everlasting expression of dignity combined with amiability.  No girl of his acquaintance could compete with her.  If I remember rightly he died a bachelor, still dreaming of wax-like perfection.  Perhaps it is as well we men are not handicapped to the same extent.  If every hoarding, if every picture shop window, if every illustrated journal teemed with illustrations of the ideal young man in perfect fitting trousers that never bagged at the knees!  Maybe it would result in our cooking our own breakfasts and making our own beds to the end of our lives.

The novelist and playwright, as it is, have made things difficult enough for us.  In books and plays the young man makes love with a flow of language, a wealth of imagery, that must have taken him years to acquire.  What does the novel-reading girl think, I wonder, when the real young man proposes to her!  He has not called her anything in particular.  Possibly he has got as far as suggesting she is a duck or a daisy, or hinting shyly that she is his bee or his honeysuckle: in his excitement he is not quite sure which.  In the novel she has been reading the hero has likened the heroine to half the vegetable kingdom.  Elementary astronomy has been exhausted in his attempt to describe to her the impression her appearance leaves on him.  Bond Street has been sacked in his endeavour to get it clearly home to her what different parts of her are like—her eyes, her teeth, her heart, her hair, her ears.  Delicacy alone prevents his extending the catalogue.  A Fiji Island lover might possibly go further.  We have not yet had the Fiji Island novel.  By the time he is through with it she must have a somewhat confused notion of herself—a vague conviction that she is a sort of condensed South Kensington Museum.