Refused to marry painted women

I thought they also had to be 'hussys" before the paint was a bad thing.

The first article is distinctly curious, in that it refers to Arthur Wells as "Dean of a fashionable church." This is a very odd thing to say, since a Dean is a particular ecclesiastical position in the Church of England, a senior clergyman who is the head of the Chapter of a cathedral or a collegiate church. One does not refer to a "Dean of a fashionable Church", but to the Dean's actual post. In London that would mean either the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, or the Dean of Westminster Abbey, neither of whom commonly conduct marriages, and neither of whom at the time were named Arthur Wells (the Dean of St. Paul's was the celebrated "Gloomy Dean" Inge, and the Dean of Westminster was William F. Norris. So Wells cannot have been the Dean of a church. He may have been a "rural dean", but this is a position with reference to a region, not a single church, and rural deans are never given the title of Dean. So it is a most curious error.

Paint and Powder -- those words, used in connection with marriage, make me think of scarlet letters and shotgun weddings.

Women mostly paint us men into a corner where there is no safe answer or response. Lose - Lose
Kinda akin to voting for a president.

I heard a line on a TV show last week, "If voting actually worked they'd make it illegal."

BD, sweetheart, you fellas paint yourselves into the corner quite well without any help from us girls. 😉

Rev. G. Charmley -- I suspect that whatever reporter wrote the article, back in 1926, used the word 'dean' without really knowing what it meant.

Or the Reverend identified as such. I suspect this because he seems to have been a pompous ass and being full of ones own self importance generally goes along with that.

When you use it as a formal title -- Dean of Admissions, Dean of Westminster Abbey -- it's capitalized.

When it's someone who is the acknowledged master of specific people or an area -- "Robert Frost was the dean of American poets" -- it's lowercase.

The reporter used it correctly in the article, in lowercase, to denote Rev. Wells was the master of that church (as opposed to ministers who are subordinate in their church or are itinerant).

The headline is correct because the capitalization is forced by position (first word in a sentence, in a headline, etc.) rather than by definition. "dean Wells" rather than "Rev. Wells, head of a church, . . . " obeys the basic rules of headlines which ensures the most emphasis/information in the most concise way. It keeps the number of words to a minimum while denoting that Wells was actually in charge of something, not just someone who bought their title for $5 from a newspaper ad.

The usage might lead to a little confusion, especially since 'Dean' might have been the man's first name, but it isn't technically wrong.

His name's Arthur Wells; I can find a reference to him as priest of a Brixton church a couple of years earlier, but it doesn't say where he went. Presumably he went off to lead another church elsewhere in London. Still, calling him "dean" even non-capitalised when there's an official title of Dean in the same profession is wrong, IYAM. It's like calling Prince Charles king of Wales. He just isn't. And he wouldn't have called himself that, either; not for long, anyway. He'd have been whistled down pronto.
At first I thought it might've been a typo for deacon - a distinctly lower title - but as he was certainly already a full priest by then, that couldn't have been it, either. No, it's definitely a journalistic simplification on the part of the Ottawa Journal.

Leaves us with the question of what this "fashionable church" was, and how fashionable it was in reality. As said, I couldn't find it, only one where he was a few years earlier.

>>a journalistic simplification on the part of the Ottawa Journal.

It was actually an AP story. The exact same text ran in quite a few papers.