MY OLD MAN was once asked his idea of a beautiful woman and he said that was a foolish question. He said no two men ever had the same idea of a beautiful woman and that this was a good thing because when they did there was apt to be a shooting match.
He said his idea of a beautiful woman might be another man’s idea of a crow. My old man said beauty in many a woman was concealed to every eye but that of a fellow who likes her. He said he had often seen a woman whose face would stop a clock, but who was deemed beautiful by some Jake who was in love with her.
He used to tell about how he lost a dear good friend back down the years in our old home town of Pueblo. This friend, whose name we will call Fred, fell in love with a lady who was a regular gee-whizzer of a clock-stopper, according to my old man, and what he could not reconcile with Fred’s admiration of her was the fact that Fred was a lover of beauty in other things.
My old man said he and Fred used to go walking and Fred would speak of the beauty of the trees and the flowers and of the cloud formations and the birds and the far-away mountains and things like that, and he enjoyed looking at paintings and other works of art. My old man said he guessed Fred came about as close to being an aesthete as any man that ever lived in our old home town, and maybe closer.
He was therefore surprised and shocked by Fred’s adoration of the clock-stopper, and by his declarations that she was beautiful. My old man said he knew it was the first time Fred had ever been in love, and he got to figuring that the only reason Fred thought the lady was beautiful was because he had never before noticed any other women and did not know that they came in any different models.
So one day my old man got one of the generally acknowledged prize beauties of our old home town to walk down Main Street with the object of Fred’s worship, and he took pains to have Fred standing with him on a comer when the ladies went past. He then began calling Fred’s attention to certain material points of difference in the pair.
My old man asked Fred to notice that his girl was bandy-legged and had large flat feet, while the beauty’s pins were as straight as an arrow and her feet were high-arched and as small as mice, and my old man explained to Fred, just in case he might not know that this was the only way a lady’s feet ought to be.
He told Fred to compare their figures and he would see that his beloved had no more shape than a bale of hay as against that form devine of the other. He patiently explained to Fred the disadvantages of the former and the advantages of the latter. He appealed to Fred to carefully weigh that scraggly profile of his sweetheart’s in comparison to the lovely classic features of the beauty.
It was about this time, my old man said, that he thought a high wind had come along and blown a roof off on top of him, though he later learned that it was just Fred hitting him on the chin with a deftly aimed right hand. After that there was a pronounced coolness between Fred and my old man. Fred went ahead and married the lady, and he must have told her what my old man said, because she afterwards talked quite disrespectfully of him around our old home town.
Fred never spoke to him again, though the day Fred died he sent for my old man. Fred had suffered a stroke, and even then he did not speak, but my old man said Fred smiled at him and sort o' nodded his head affirmatively, and that was all there was to the incident, except the widow kept on talking disrespectfully of my old man.
He said he never afterwards tried to give anybody a steer in the matter of beauty. He just went along accepting the theory that love is blind. He said in fact if he had not taken a solemn vow he would make bold to speak to us about a girl we were going with just then. Back in our old home town when you were keeping company with a young lady you were “going with” her.
My old man said he little thought he would ever find a son of his courting a female gargoyle. He said he felt his offspring should be a better judge of beauty than that, just as a matter of instinct, but that after due consideration of various choices of ours, he had come to the conclusion that we were strangely lacking. We were a trifle indignant about his remarks because to our juvenile eyes that girl was a mighty lovely object.
My old man said he had seen pictures of the Venus de Milo, and if that was supposed to be the statue of a beautiful and perfect woman he must be cock-eyed. He said he thought she was too thick in spots. Still, he said, he knew men right there in our own home town who did not think a woman was beautiful unless she was beef to the heels. He said those men would not look at a tall thin woman if she had the face of an houri, or at a little woman if she was as pretty as a pup.
On the other hand, he said he could show you men who thought the smaller issues the more beautiful. My old man said he guessed beauty in women was just a point of view.