Who Do You Think You Are, Part 2

As a matter of fact, you will probably have to muffle both door-bell and telephone if you can put yourself over as a gay, interesting, and up-to-date person. Anyone can, if she has sufficient determination. You can't sit at home and wait for these qualities to descend upon you like a light from Heaven, but you can acquire them by means of a little serious concentration on friends, hobbies, parties, books, and almost anything else that keeps you interested. Anyone of them -or, more accurately, any ten or twelve-will also keep you interesting. But you've got to have variety. Your specialties or hobbies, are all very well (we're going to say a lot about them later on), but they're not enough. Every woman should have a smattering of knowledge about practically everything. The half-dozen things you may have time to know thoroughly (if you're very ambitious) will amuse and broaden you and make you a better talker, but they will not make you a better companion, which involves being a good listener. To listen well, you must have at least a vague idea of what the other fellow is talking about (unless you're really clever). It is both boring and irritating for him to have to adapt his conversation so that you can understand it.

The same need of at least a dusting of knowledge applies when you go to plays, concerts, operas, radio, lectures, sermons, art exhibits, foreign places, and almost everything else that we can think of except motion pictures, which are usually fool-proof (and need to be). But more than that, it does wonders to your morale. No one can be in the know about most of the current goingson without feeling that she is, after all, a pretty smart person-a feeling that even the best of us soon communicate to our friends. (What the friends think will be taken up in the next chapter.)

One last point about this mental picture of yourself: you won't get far unless you resemble it at least slightly. It takes a genius to make an impression in run-down heels and an unbecoming hat. You need good clothes and grooming-unless, of course, you think of yourself as a poor thing; in which case, it's nothing to us whether you get far or not. Our vote is for a little pampering - as much, in fact, as can be squeezed out of your schedule and your budget, and we have often noticed that it is not the ladies with the uncrowded schedules and large budgets who look the best.

We are not going into the subject of clothes. There is no reason why the woman who lives alone should look any different from the woman who doesn't, and every reason why she shouldn't. But do have some really smart street costumes-surprisingly, they can cost as little as dowdy ones, and practically no one's morale can overcome an outfit that's all wrong. Do have some evening clothes with swish, and very speedily - do have at least one nice seductive tea-gown to wear when you're alone (or when you're not, if you feel like it).

Do go in for cosmetics in a serious way. Not any old cream, but the right creams. The right coiffure, too, and the right nail-polish, and all the other beauty tricks that make you feel elegant. This is the kind of pampering that pays.

There are other good kinds: a glass of sherry and an extra special dinner charmingly served on a night when you're tired and all alone; bath salts in your tub and toilet-water afterward; a new and spicy book when you're spending an evening in bed; a trim little cotton frock that flatters you on an odd morning when you decide to be violently domestic. The notion that it "doesn't matter because nobody sees you," with the dull meals and dispirited clothes that follow in its wake, has done more damage than all the floods of springtime.

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