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Show ROMANTIC MEN. Male stars of a large motion picture pic-ture company must smoke no more cigars because, their employers say, cigars are not . romantic. Without questioning the authority of Hollywood Holly-wood (where kisses are measured by the front foot of celluloid) on romance, ro-mance, it may be -mildly objected that this is a rather sad judgment on the love affairs of our recent ancestors. Men have been smoking for more than 300 years, and for nearly a third of that time the cigar has been the gentleman's smoke. Were all of onr mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers great-grandmothers dragged protesting ti the altar by unromantic cigar-smoking brutes? Middle-aged and even young men who have been drafted to front parlors par-lors to smoke the moths out of lace curtains and carpets, know that the rich fragrance of a good cigar cannot can-not be completely disagreeable to women. Richard Dix and Rod La Rocque, both of whom have been photographed smoking cigars, have attained a certain romantic lustre for the eyes of women movie-goers in spite of,- or perhaps partly because of their smoking preference. The cigarette is no longer the peculiar pe-culiar property of the male. In high-class high-class tobacco shops in New York, pipes which will hold about enough tobacco to kill a moth, with gold and platinum decorations and studdings of semi-precious stones, are sold to women wo-men the pipe is no longer a purely masculine appurtenance. Yet, even in these days of depression, depres-sion, six billion cigars are sold in the United States every year to men only. The cigar is still a distinctive badge of masculinity. |