The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-05-21
rench Girls Are l I aught Thrift - ] Very Young
Bx MARGERY WELLS

nARIS, May 19.-The French girl who is as modern as any iI
 America, who earns her own liv z2sag and keeps her own house, knows
 w to make her wages stretch farther
 you could believe possible if you
 e to see the size of the wages.
 ' ye have always heard how prevalent
 French people were, and we have
 1er attached that story to the bus
 Ids and wives who kept stores to-
 ter or ran little businesses. It was N fashioned and sweet as story and Y liked the idea for foreigners. But M ', one comes to France and by look
 about with a searching eye, one
 covers. that the modern descendants
 these people are taking all those < grthy traits and applying them to
 pdern life in the most picturesque As4y and with q flare and success that puts us to shame with all our eff ciency and modern principles of work manship.
 The working girls in France, mind you, have a much harder time than we in America have. Their salaries are lower, they are not so accustomed to going out and battling with the world, 4 their actions in this respect are not so  and the demands upon them are, in many respects, much greater than they are with us.
 But French girl will plan her ward robe ahead for year with the great est thought and care and with all the feeling for style which she possesses just naturally. She will economize and save on this and that and when you see the finished result you have no feeling that a penny has been stinted anywhere. And, as a matter of fact, there has been not the least squeezing of the coins. There has been only good, cold hard common sense applied to the problem at hand. A French girl 2 --stenographer in a big publishing house--told me that she allowed her self three pairs of silk stockings a year. She showed me the stockings and they were of the finest and most wear able and most exquisite quality. These abe wears for all dress and splendid occasions in her life and for everyday she has fine lisle ones that look as smart as can be but cost much less. Wen, you know, she is not giving out for her stockings anything like the amount of money that the average American girl would spend.
 Another girl took me to the place where she buys her frocks. The things I saw there would ravish the heart of any American girl who loves good dressing. There were tucks and pleats and bindings all made with the most delicate of hand stitches. There was hemstitching and there were rolled edges. There was nothing made heavily by machine and all the frocks were copies of those presented some weeks earlier by a leading dressmaker of Paris. Here she picked out one dress --her best dress for the year. It cost a lot of money-for her-greater in proportion to what she earned than most American girls would wish to spend. But she made arrangements for paying on a monthly installment basis and when she had her dress she had something that Mrs. Astor would have been proud to wear, and proud indeed if she could have worn it with so much grace and charm as did this little French lady.
 A French girls hair-it is really a ''coiffureHt-a1ways looks charmingly. It is so good looking that one knows immediately she could not have done it all by herself-that she must have had