Part 3

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*

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 _soupcon_, 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*

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!