Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 110, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 May 1910 — CURLS OR CREST. [ARTICLE]

CURLS OR CREST.

Little German Teacher Cared Nothing for Personal Adornment. In the recent admirable biography of Prof. Carla Wenckebach of Welesley, her close friend and successor, Margarethe Muller, has introduced to the general public a figure long honored for scholarship, loved for kindliness and smiled at for quaint and delightful oddities of character and aspect within the bounds of the "College Beautiful." ‘‘Little Bismarck,” the girls sometimes nicknamed the genial but masterful German professor, with her short hair and serviceable clothes of unconsciously mannish effect. Mannish by intention she never was, but she had;' from her tomboy childhood, a curious impatience of friperies and lack of personal vanity. She was a girl of fifteen when she wrote home casually from school: “By the way, I wear my hair short now; got rid of braids, hairpins and appendages'six months <ago; feel very free and light without them. My friends wail about the 'loss of my ‘beautiful thick hair,’ but what is the use of beauty if it causes continual annoyance?” Seme years later, in New York, she received a comically apt reply to this youthfully philosophic query. She had applied to an agent to secure her a position as governess, and was promptly assured that if she wished a recommendation she must wear more stylish clothes and change her way of doing her hair. “ ‘The essential consideration is,’ the agent said, ‘not what's in your head, but what’s on it.’ So I went to a little Parisian, who knew what the matter was even before I explained. ‘lf you don’t want to take the trouble to dress your hair every day,’ she said, “why don’t you wear a false front?’ I was just about to shout, a determined Never! when she dextrously put one of those curly things on my head. And really—the little curls framed my face quite pleasingly, and looked exactly as if they had grown on my own scalp. Now if fortune comes my way, you will know what has attracted the fickle thing.” Quite certainly, after fortune was attracted, the commercially inspired curls disappeared forever. All her girls and her friends remember well what one of them describes as “that wonderful square head of hers, with its crown of- short blonde hair. which bristled up over her fine u row like the crest of an alert bird.” ' For details of costume ,or coiffure •lit never learned to although on

festal occasions she donned, with a childlike taste for mere brightness, an abundance of sparkling ornaments and fabrics of startlingly brilliant hugs. Her interest in her ,wn appearance remained small; but to £pauty in others she was keenly responsive. In her last illness, when a lovely young student friend came to call, she insisted that the girl’s chair be so placed that she, from her bed, could ably see the “pretty pussy” all the time. —Youth's Companion. Bores talk about themselves; gossips talk about others.