Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 242, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 October 1913 — He Had a Few Opinions [ARTICLE]

He Had a Few Opinions

“I have absolutely nothing to say about it,” declared the man. Then he began to talk freely. “I don’t like that dress,” he declared. “In the first place, it doesn’t look like a dress. It might just as well be a 750 piece picture puzzle on a horse and buggy as a dress, according to my notions! I don’t care if it is style—the person who invented that style ought to be shot or else made to wear the dress. I think myself that I’d prefer to be shot. Women have gone completely crazy this season, and every man will tell you that same thing! Yet you women say you dress to please the men! "Now, see here!” the man went on, warming to his subject. “What pleasure do you suppose a man derives from gazing at a woman whose sole aim in life is to look as absolutely different from the way a woman is cupposed to look as the brainstorm of an insane chop suey dress artist can make her? I’ll bet the Frenchman who invented that rig of yours tied his head up in a bag ai d then stood on it, whirled around three times and somersaulted into a pile of dress goods, grabbed things as he went through, and, when he landed, held what he had collected till his breathless assistants pinned them together as they were. Then no doubt he called for absinth and the $l5O price mark and went home to dinner feeling that he had created something worth while and had thereby won the eternal gratitude of womankind.

“If he had not done it that way,” went on the man, “it would have been outside human achievement for any one to put together in one piece of chiffon, a bath towel/ glass buttons, a strip of satin and an embroidered dishcloth. The thing in front looks like .a dishcloth anyway, and If you ripped it oft and gave it to Delia to wash pans with she’d be insulted! You can try it if you like, for you’ve got to make use of that dress-some-how. I’m against wasting things. The bath towel part is easy, and maybe you could make me a necktie out of the satin strip, but unless you can make a jlgamaree for your hair out of the chiffon I fear it is useless unless you could use it for screening on the basement windows. “I’m not saying your taste in dress is worse than that of any other woman. Unless a man breaks his neck keeping his eyes glued on the stars or wears blinders, he can’t avoid seeing remarkable signs in every direction. I met a woman the other day who 20 years ago would have been comfortably relegated to garndma’s rocking chair, would have worn her gray hair parted and plastered down, and would have had white ruching at the top of the collar of her black dress, and she wouldn’t have had any more figure than a flour sack. "Well, today this same woman was tripping down the street in heeled pumps with buckles on ’em, and as she stood she resembled a slice of

pie, ami with the point on the grand. What kind of pie? Well, it was a slice of squash pie that she resembled, if you must know. —— “From her shoulder to her heel with a perfect toboggan slide if the line had run out instead, of in. The bottom edge of her skirt was blue satin and the section up to her arms was white with green and red things dashing all over it, and there was a hint of purple and green up above. There were two feathers sticking straight up in the air in front of her Panama hat, and she had on pearl drop ear-" rings and a facial massage and a marcelled coiffure and a boxful of the best rouge and liquid powder. Maybe she was starting away and thought is safer to carry her whole season’s supply of cosmetics that way. And she was horribly well satisfied with herself, though in the depths of her harassed soul I know she yearned for a kimono, carpet slippers and a rocking chair. “The young girls are worse. Not to speak of their face enamel, the rigs they get on are enough to make a modest, sober man blush. They are skimpy where they shouldn’t be, and low where they should be high, and short where they should be long, and heavens knows what material they’ll use to make ’em of next! This year they’ve tried everything short of an oriental rag, cobwebs and the horsehair covering on the old furniture in the attic. Gunny sack garments seem to be regarded by them as particularly stylish this year.

"Just why a woman, whom the Lord made curved, should spend anguished time trying to mold herself Into the shape of an Iron cylinder or a wedge. Is beyond me! I’d rather they’d rock on the piazza and do tatting and gossip scandalously In the old-fash-ioned way. I don’t believe women can gossip in the clothes they wear today—all they can think of Is how soon they can reach home and be extracteu from their painful garb and draw a deep breath. I say it’s a sin and a shame, and I’d like to know who’s responsible for It!" "I think from what you say," murmured the man’s wife, "that you disapprove of my new dress." ■ "No, Mlrandy," said the man, "I don’t disapprove of it—l simply turn purple and froth at the mouth at sight of it So you'd better send it to your unfortunate sister, Jane, out in Montana. I always did have a grudge against Jane!"