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I am reading Agatha Christie's Peril at End House. Can anyone help me understand what "her face was innocent of make" means in the following paragraph?
It was, I think, her appearance of calm good sense that so attracted me. A quiet girl, pretty in the old-fashioned sense-certainly not smart. Her face was innocent of make-up and she wore a simple, rather shabby, black evening dress. She had frank blue eyes, and a pleasant slow voice.
"Make-up" is a single compound word meaning cosmetics applied on the face.
"Innocent" here simply means "without". Per Google/Lexico:
without; lacking.
"a street quite innocent of bookstores"
So "her face was innocent of make-up" means "her face was without make-up", or "she didn't use any cosmetics on her face."
Make-up was long held to be morally questionable. You wore it to be more alluring, it misrepresented what you actually looked like, and you were risking your life and health for mere vanity, perhaps, especially if you used lead-based or arsenic-based make-up.
This view was decreasing but not wholly gone by the time this book published. Therefore, metaphorically calling the absence of make-up "innocence" was implying she had a degree of virtue for not wearing it -- and underscoring how she was still so "old-fashioned" as to refrain.
