te on anything
_sans aucune connaissance speciale_. Camilla Blythely says she
just sends in her photo and signature and those obliging newspaper
people do the rest--which is most helpful to a busy person. But
then we can't all be as notorious as dear Camilla.

I hope it isn't getting just a little overdone. But I hear that
lots of papers are offering only three guineas a column now for
quite important signatures, while others actually insist on
contributors writing their own articles.

_Quant a moi_, I'm writing up the light side of the Peace
Conference. I do those snappy pars about LLOYD GEORGE'S ties and
CLEMENCEAU'S gloves and all those little domestic touches that
people would much rather read about than such remote things as
Czecho-Slovaks and Jugo-Slavs. I did a most _thrilling_ three
columns about the hats of the delegates, from the bowler of Mr.
BONAR LAW to the "coffieh" and "igal" headdress of EMIR FAISUL,
the Arab Prince. (It's always so effective if you can stick in a
word or two like that that nobody understands. You never need get
them right).

Talking of odd words, the latest _boutade_ over here is to find
new names and epithets for our dress materials--some of them quite
weird. If you want a silk _tricot_ you ask for "_djersador_,"
while a coarser texture is "_djersacier_"; "_mousseux_" now
describes velvet as well as champagne; _ninon_ is known as
"_vapoureuse"_; while to make one of the newest Spring dresses you
require only three-and-a-half yards of "_Salome_." Some of the
_couturiers_ in the Rue de la Paix are issuing fashion-pronouncing
handbooks, while others have their own interpreters to assist
customers.

The theatres over here are getting extremely--well, what our
grandparents termed "_risques_," but it really goes further than
that. And the worst of it is my countrypeople seem to think
it's the smart thing to go to them, which they do most
indiscriminately. _Heureusement_ they don't understand the stuff.
Whenever I see a most circumspect and highly proper British matron
entering one of the Boulevard theatres nowadays I think what
a mercy it is that we as a nation rely so much on pronouncing
phrase-books for acquiring foreign languages. It keeps one so
single-minded in the midst of a wicked world.

But, after all, propriety is a _ques