“When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day,” by Dorothy Parker, was originally published in the November 1917 issue of Vogue.
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It all started when I crossed the French gray threshold of Mme. Claudine, beauty specialist. Up to that time, I have always considered myself happy. My life was singularly free from care and sorrow, and I knew nothing of the bitterness of labour. But that is all over now. I will never be the innocent girl that I was before Mme. Claudine, beauty specialist. came into my life. I may pet over it, but I shall never be the same.
You see, I have always had a longing to be beautiful. It was a veritable obsession with me. As a result of having people say to me, in early youth. “Don’t you care—handsome is as handsome does,” or “Never you mind. dear, it isn’t always a pretty face that attracts the men,” I grew quite bitter about the thing. I took every pretty woman as a personal affront, and every time some unusually dazzling creature passed me, I murmured, resentfully, “‘There, but for the grace of God, go I!” But, though I longed with all my heart to be beautiful, I never took any action about it. I didn’t know exactly what to do. I realized that there were far too many beautiful women in this world for beauty to be a mere gift of nature, but I had no idea how it was attained,—that is, I had no idea until I went to see Mme. Claudine. Mme. Claudine’s mauve and French pray salon was a deceit-fully unbusinesslike place, cloying with the odours of myriad creams and powders. Mme. Claudine herself was tall and dark and exquisitely painted, clad in a gray gown that looked as if it had been put on with a brush. She had a manner singularly at variance with her looks, for she was brisk and businesslike, and she spoke volubly, in a clear, rather loud voice.
The Etceteras of Beauty
When women stop wanting to be beautiful, and Mme. Claudine is forced to discontinue her business as a beauty specialist, another calling is awaiting her. She can become an agent for “The Lives and Letters of the World’s Greatest Composers,” in fourteen volumes; so unmistakable a talent I have never seen. In half an hour she had sold me more creams, lotions, soaps, ointments, and appliances than I had even known existed. When the case containing all the articles was deposited in my hall that afternoon, I could not believe that it held my purchases. I thought that some one had played a joke on me and sent me a Ford.
Mme. Claudine was nothing if not thorough. She set down a diet list, rigidly excluding everything palatable, she wrote a series of exercises, and she gave me a folio of instructions as to the exact use of each aid to beauty that I had acquired. It seemed that the important part of the treatment was that it must be applied at night, just before retiring. The last hour, before I went to bed, was to be the busiest hour of the day. She gave me the impression that everything would be ruined if the rites were con- ducted by daylight. It must all be done at night,—the exercises most be gone through, the lotions applied, the contrivances to bring beauty nearer must be donned. Those were her last words to me, “Remember, at night, just before you go to bed.”
I wondered why, at the time, one must do all this just before going to bed. I know, now, all too well. It is because, after one has finished with her struggle for beauty, she is so exhausted that she couldn’t possibly do anything but go to bed. But I am digressing.
In the Watches of the Night
That night, I locked myself in what the early- Victorian novelists called the privacy of my chamber. I knew that one should have a French maid or so to assist with the ceremonies,—they are part of the rite. But, although not at all a clairvoyant sort of person, I seemed to see a picture of what I was going to look like when I was accoutred in some of those beauty contrivances of Mme. Claudine’s invention, and I felt it was one of those times which come in the life of every woman, when it is best to be alone.
I started the performance at my usual retiring-hour, thinking, in my blissful ignorance, that it would be all over in about twenty minutes. I have since learned that one should begin one’s beauty culture about tea-time,—that is. if one wishes to go to bed the same night.
The first thing on the list was my hair. In happier days, I had always brushed my hair fifty times, night and morning, and called it a day. But that was mere child’s play compared to Mme. Claudine’s system. First, the scalp had to be massaged for twenty minutes.—how easy that is to read! There has never been a longer twenty minutes in my life than that one. After five minutes had passed I was thoroughly bored, but I massaged doggedly on, grimly determined to obey instructions to the letter, if I died for it. When that was over, my hair had to be brushed two hundred and thirty-seven times. I have often wondered why the thirty-seven, and I have concluded that it is just to wonder about—to give you something to think of, so you won’t go mad in the dreary counting of the strokes. Mme. Claudine had insisted on the use of a special brush, which, when I first lifted it. I thought must weigh easily five pounds. By the time I had finished using it, I decided that it weighed twenty.
The next events on Mme. Claudine’s programme are the exercises. The deep- breathing ones, according to her dictum, are to be done in front of an open win- dow. I opened the window as wide as possible and bravely took up my stand in front of it, praying that the people across the street were still in the country. And then I started breathing deeply, making dramatic gestures with my arms, meanwhile, according to instructions,— holding them out in front entreatingly, raising them above my head exultingly, stretching them wide wearily, dropping them at my sides hopelessly. I did this until exhaustion made me stop. Then I turned my attention to the more strenuous exercises on the list.
Indoor Sports
The first of these was that delightful little pastime of touching the floor with the finger-tips without bending the knees. ‘I”he directions read. “May do only ten times at first. Increase later.” Mme. Claudine is about as indulgent as Simon Legree. I did that exercise ten times, carefully and painfully abstaining from bending my knees at first, later cheating shamelessly and bending them recklessly. The next exercise necessitated lying down, —oh, on the floor of course. That makes it harder. Implicitly obeying instructions, I lay down on my back and put my hands behind my head, just like “Peter Ibbetson.” Then I raised my left foot high in the air, contemplated it for a while, then dropped it to the floor, only to repeat the performance with my right foot. I did this ten times. There may be some who can go through these exercises and still keep their dignity and self-respect, but I felt extremely bashful and self-conscious.
The final exercise consisted of rolling— rolling the length of the room and then rolling back again, like a human egg-race. This, too, should be done ten times. Here, again, I cheated,—I only did it eight. By that time, I felt exactly like a British tank.
At the conclusion of these atrocities, I rose painfully to my feet and glanced at the clock. So far, my beauty culture had taken just an hour and a quarter.
“It’s a good thing I don’t have to do this in the daytime,” I mused. “It would cut into my knitting frightfully.”
A Legion of Lotions
My face was the next object of my devotions. There were several volumes of instructions on the subject of the face alone. I washed my face in every conceivable manner and from every known angle. I drenched it with lotions and then washed off every trace of them and put on others. One had to keep working in circles that way, it seemed. Nothing was ever definitely put on and left to stay there and do its worst. Everything was rubbed grudgingly on and then washed hastily off, to be immediately replaced by something else, which, in turn, was only allowed to stay an instant. It was an endless process and a thankless one. To complicate matters, I became lost in a maze of jars and bottles. I lost track of the lotions I had used and those I hadn’t. I had a hideous feeling that in my helpless confusion I had applied certain of the lotions two and even three times, while others I had neglected utterly. I foresaw the need of a resident expert accountant.
And then the era of the appliances began. First there was a set of little crescents of plaster, meant to adorn the corners of my eyes and mouth, to frighten away trespassing wrinkles. I applied them gingerly to my face. But that wasn’t all. There was a sort of harness next,—an implement of tapes and straps and bandages that passed under the chin and around the head. I forget just what was the purpose of this instrument. If it was invented for the promotion of insomnia, it certainly accomplished its end. It is scarcely a becoming article, and the process of donning it makes one feel strangely like a fire-horse. Until I had worn this arrangement, I felt that nothing could be more uncomfortable than the relentless bits of plaster on my face. I realized almost instantly, however, that I had been gravely mistaken.
That being all that any mortal face could stand, my hands were the next victims. They had to be massaged, first, with their own little horde of skin foods. Then I wormed into a pair of medicated gloves, that were to make my hands phenomenally soft and white. They reached to my elbows, and, though Mme. Claudine had assured me that they were the right size, they seemed to have been made for some one of about the general build of Grant’s Tomb.
A Fitting Finale
But the last touches—oh, those were the things! All that I had previously undergone was mere entertainment com’ pared to Mme. Claudine’s swan song—the last things she had wished on me. There were ten of them,—ten wicked little instruments of cruelly glittering steel, to slip on one’s fingers and make them taper gracefully. Each little instrument is provided with a screw. You fit the implement on your innocent unsuspecting finger, then screw it tightly. When the pressure is as tight as you ca endure without screaming, you give it screw a few more twists, and leave it that way all night.
That concluded the evening’s entertainment. Evidently, Mme. Claudine’s imagination had given out. I was allowed have the few remaining hours of the night for my own devices. Weary and aching. I leaned on a chair for much-needed sup port and sadly surveyed myself m mirror. I can only say that my appearance would have been grounds for divorce in any state in the Union.
For the first time in my life, I was overcome by a dread of fire. I would rather have perished in the flames than let any fireman see me as I was. I prayed fervently to be delivered from burg and from messenger boys bearing telegrams. I shivered at the horrid thought “Suppose I should die in the night!”
I have never continued my beauty course. I know that I should have courage, that it is weak and unfeminine not to go on with it. The still full bottles and jars, the empty gloves and headdress, are so many silent reproaches to me. But I cannot bring myself to again. I have never fully recovered from my one adventure in quest of beauty. I shall never be the same. There are segments of me that will never stop aching again. Yet the world is full of women who go through the whole routine every night of their lives! And to think that dauntless creatures like that can’t have the vote!
