The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-11-27
Dorothy DiT
Lost Looks Don't Mean Lost Love-Pretty Is As Pretty
 Does" With Wives
Love Doesn't Fade With Beauty

| It Is curious thing that when a woman loses her husbands affec- tions she invariably attributes it to losing her looks. She pins her faith to the theory tha. the only thing you can hold man with is a corset string, and so, nine out of ten mid themselves, and going through all sorts of torturing exercises trying to keep a siriish figure. and are dye ing their hair and painting their faces, in futile endeavor to simu- late the youth they have lost, and to fool their husbands into believing they are still in the flapper class.
 So obsessed are women by the idea that the only thing men care for in a woman Is beauty, that 1t has come to be the standard alibi for every de- serted wife.
 We continually hear it said that after Mrs. x got fat and grizzle- headed Mir. x forsook her for a younger and prettier woman, where upon all of her sisters weep tears of sympathy on Mrs. Ks breast, and an- athematize x for his faithlessness to one who had given him her youthful pulchritude and who was scorned as soon as 1t was gone.
 or course, the insstence of women y, and the belief that a mans love is wholly and entirely dependent upon Woman's good looks, Is a grand and gorgeous excuse for wives not keep ing the love they have won. It saves their faces, as the Chinese say, for 1t makes preserving a husbands af- fect1onS matter of pure luck, be- yond their control. instead of being matter of art, and subtelty, add work and self-control, that lies entirely within their own voiition.
 For no woman is responsible for losing her beauty. As matter of fact, she is bound to lcse 1t because time takes toll of even the peachiest. Figures grow more meagre or stout CT. Hair loses it's sheen, eyes their luster. The roses fade out of the cheks, and life etches its story of pain and sorrow on every face. Every woman at forty Is a chromo repro duction of the living picture she was at twenty. And If love, as women think, Is hung on hair, or Is only skin deep, then there isn't a woman in the world but who Is foredoomed to lose out.
 But, fortunately for women, this notion that their husbands love them merely for their beauty, and will cease to care for them when they lose 1t, Is false doctrine. In the first place, men don't marry women for their looks, or else there would be many more old maids than now crowd of matrons, you will perceive thar not many of them would have taken hlue ribbon in beauty show. Men admire pretty face. yes. They ravc over d beauty, but they are generally content to let some other man have It.
 When a man marries woman she nO0d h e1 ba not have picked her out for a wife. and he continues to see her as she appeared to him on her wedding day just as long as she doesn't do some thing that wakes him out of his trance. and makes him give her the cold and critical once-over.
 doubt extremely If any man ever quit loving his wife because she had lost her figure or her complexion. l doubt If he ever perceived that she had lost her figure or her complexion. and was no longer the slim and beauteous maiden of his dreams until some day her nagging or her whining or her temper passed the endurable point, and then he saw her as she really was-fat, sallow- checked, ugly and unlovely-but most of all spirit ually unlovely.
 In proof of this, take the fact that among the most adored wives of our acquaintance are women who have no earthly claim to good looks-women who are frankly as homely as nature made them; women who do not even attempt to palliate their appearance by artifice of the toilet; women who have no taste in dress, but who are jolly and good-natured, so sympa- thetic and kindly, so interested in everything their husbands are in terested in, that their men have never discovered that they are not Venuses. or if they have, they don't care.
 No, the way women lose their but their ways.
 Among my acquaintahces, for in- stance, is young woman who IS married to very delightful and charming man, who Is at present very much In love with her. The husband smokes. not excessively, put | he likes his after dinner cigar, and an occasional cigarette. The wife objects to tobacco. She does not per init her husband to smoke in the house. There is a ceaseless argu- ment on the subject, and after din- ner the poor man has to go and sit on the steps, or seek the garage, or take a stroll with his cigar.
 It humiliates him that he cannot do as he pleases in his own home. Every argument on the subject leaves a little Bitterness behind 1t. The wife's prejudice Is killing all the chumminess between them, and I prophecy that in five years time the man will have ceased to care for his wife. and probably will have found some other woman with broader views toward tobacco. The