Shaw's Disagreeable Girl. The Gibson Girl lolls, loafs,
pouts, weeps, talks back, lies in wait, dreams, eats, drinks, sleeps and
yawns. She rides in a coach in a red jacket, plays golf in a secondary
sexual sweater, dawdles on a hotel veranda, and tum-tums on a piano, but
you never hear of her doing a useful thing or saying a wise one. She
reveals a beautiful capacity for avoiding all useful effort.

Gibson gilds the Disagreeable Girl. Shaw paints her as she is. In the
"Doll's House" Henrik Ibsen has given us Nora Hebler, a Disagreeable
Girl of mature age, who beyond a doubt first set George Bernard Shaw
a-thinking. Then looking about, Shaw saw her at every turn in every
stage of her moth-and-butterfly existence.

And the Disagreeable Girl being everywhere, Shaw, dealer in human
character, can not write a play and leave her out, any more than Turner
could paint a picture and leave man out, or Paul Veronese produce a
canvas and omit the dog.

The Disagreeable Girl is a female of the genus homo persuasion, built
around a digestive apparatus with marked marshmallow proclivities.

She is, moreover, pretty, pug-nosed, poetical, pert and pink; and at
first glance to the unwary, she shows signs of gentleness and
intelligence. Her age is anywhere from eighteen to twenty-eight. At
twenty-eight she begins to evolve into something else, and her capacity
for harm is largely curtailed, because by this time spirit has written
itself in her form and features, and the grossness and animality which
before were veiled are now becoming apparent. Habit writes itself on the
face, and the body is an automatic recording-machine.

To have a beautiful old age, you must live a beautiful youth, for we
ourselves are posterity and every man is his own ancestor. I am today
what I am because I was yesterday what I was.

The Disagreeable Girl is always pretty--at least she has been told she
is pretty, and she fully accepts the dictum. She has also been told she
is clever, and she thinks she is. The actual fact is she is only
"sassy."

The fine flaring-up of youth has set sex rampant, but she is not
"immoral," except in her mind. She has caution to the verge of
cowardice, and so she is "sans reproche." In public she pretends to be
dainty; but alone, or with those for whose good opinion she does not
care, she is gross, coarse and sensual in every feature of her life. She
eats too much, does not exercise enough, and considers it amusing to let
ot