FLOWERS BEDECK BIER OF 'BEST-DRESSED GIRL', di Lannie Haynes Martin

"Little Virginia Rappe, 'the best-dressed girl in the movies,' whose up-to-the-minute clothes have been the admiration and the envy of thousands, wears today the oldest known garment in the world. It is a shroud.

"Today her body lies in state, from 10 to 4 in the Strother and Dayton undertaking establishment on Hollywood Blvd. Tomorrow morning at 10:30 a simple burial service will be read by the Rev. Frank Rodenbush of St.Stephen's Church.

Miss Everett Matoon and Miss Jessie Pease will render a few sweet and tender old-fashioned melodies, and then the remains of the girl whose death has shocked the nation will be placed in the Hollywood cemetery. Wrapped in her winding sheet of sheer white silk, a sheaf of dead white roses on her breast, her lips parted, showing her pearly teeth, there is still some of the old-time beauty and sweetness in her face, but the sparkle of her eyes, her chief charm, lies forever dimmed beneath her heavy lashes....

"Today hundreds will pass through this flower-bedecked chapel and view the body. In that throng will be the kindly sympathetic, the friendly acquaintance, the screen worshiper, the merely morbidly curious. Will any of these remember another dead Virginia who lay in state in the Forum of Rome? The Virginia slain by the hand of her own father to save her from the rapacious embrace of the licentious Claudius? Will any pause and recall that the death of Virginia was the means of ending the corrupt saturnalia of ancient Rome, which is said to have had no parallel until the present day. Would not this dead girl now, whose every impulse was said to have been wholesome and kindly, whose life is said to have been given to defend her honor, would she not feel that her life and death had not been in vain if those who read her story would be influenced to saner, simpler living, would see as she saw at the end how futile it is to seek gaity and pleasure which are not 'within the law.'"

 

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