It all started when I crossed the French gray threshold of Mme.
Claudine, beauty specialist.
Up to that time, I have always considered myself happy.
Dorothy Parker: (1893-1967) American writer of humorous short stories.
My life was singularly free from care and sorrow, and I knew nothing of the bitterness of labour.
But that is all over now.
I will never be the innocent girl that I was before Mme.
Claudine, beauty specialist.
came into my life.
I may pet over it, but I shall never be the same.
You see, I have always had a longing to be beautiful.
It was a veritable obsession with me.
As a result of having people say to me, in early youth.
“Don’t you carehandsome is as handsome does,” or “Never you mind.
I didn’t know exactly what to do.
When women stop wanting to be beautiful, and Mme.
Claudine is forced to discontinue her business as a beauty specialist, another calling is awaiting her.
I thought that some one had played a joke on me and sent me a Ford.
Claudine was nothing if not thorough.
The last hour, before I went to bed, was to be the busiest hour of the day.
She gave me the impression that everything would be ruined if the rites were con- ducted by daylight.
I wondered why, at the time, one must do all this just before going to bed.
I know, now, all too well.
But I am digressing.
That night, I locked myself in what the early- Victorian novelists called the privacy of my chamber.
I have since learned that one should begin one’s beauty culture about tea-time,that is.
if one wishes to go to bed the same night.
The first thing on the list was my hair.
But that was mere child’s play compared to Mme.
First, the scalp had to be massaged for twenty minutes.how easy that is to read!
There has never been a longer twenty minutes in my life than that one.
When that was over, my hair had to be brushed two hundred and thirty-seven times.
Claudine had insisted on the use of a special brush, which, when I first lifted it.
I thought must weigh easily five pounds.
By the time I had finished using it, I decided that it weighed twenty.
The next events on Mme.
Claudine’s programme are the exercises.
I did this until exhaustion made me stop.
Then I turned my attention to the more strenuous exercises on the list.
‘I"he directions read.
“May do only ten times at first.
Claudine is about as indulgent as Simon Legree.
The next exercise necessitated lying down, oh, on the floor of course.
That makes it harder.
I did this ten times.
This, too, should be done ten times.
Here, again, I cheated,I only did it eight.
By that time, I felt exactly like a British tank.
At the conclusion of these atrocities, I rose painfully to my feet and glanced at the clock.
So far, my beauty culture had taken just an hour and a quarter.
“It would cut into my knitting frightfully.”
My face was the next object of my devotions.
There were several volumes of instructions on the subject of the face alone.
I washed my face in every conceivable manner and from every known angle.
I drenched it with lotions and then washed off every trace of them and put on others.
One had to keep working in circles that way, it seemed.
Nothing was ever definitely put on and left to stay there and do its worst.
It was an endless process and a thankless one.
To complicate matters, I became lost in a maze of jars and bottles.
I lost track of the lotions I had used and those I hadn’t.
I foresaw the need of a resident expert accountant.
And then the era of the appliances began.
I applied them gingerly to my face.
But that wasn’t all.
I forget just what was the purpose of this instrument.
If it was invented for the promotion of insomnia, it certainly accomplished its end.
I realized almost instantly, however, that I had been gravely mistaken.
That being all that any mortal face could stand, my hands were the next victims.
They had to be massaged, first, with their own little horde of skin foods.
They reached to my elbows, and, though Mme.
But the last touchesoh, those were the things!
All that I had previously undergone was mere entertainment com’ pared to Mme.
Claudine’s swan songthe last things she had wished on me.
Each little instrument is provided with a screw.
You fit the implement on your innocent unsuspecting finger, then screw it tightly.
That concluded the evening’s entertainment.
Claudine’s imagination had given out.
I was allowed have the few remaining hours of the night for my own devices.
I leaned on a chair for much-needed sup port and sadly surveyed myself m mirror.
I can only say that my appearance would have been grounds for divorce in any state in the Union.
For the first time in my life, I was overcome by a dread of fire.
I would rather have perished in the flames than let any fireman see me as I was.
I prayed fervently to be delivered from burg and from messenger boys bearing telegrams.
I shivered at the horrid thought “Suppose I should die in the night!”
I have never continued my beauty course.
But I cannot bring myself to again.
I have never fully recovered from my one adventure in quest of beauty.
I shall never be the same.
There are segments of me that will never stop aching again.
Yet the world is full of women who go through the whole routine every night of their lives!
And to think that dauntless creatures like that can’t have the vote!
