Miss America

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                             MISS AMERICA

                        PEN AND CAMERA SKETCHES
                         OF THE AMERICAN GIRL

                                  BY

                            ALEXANDER BLACK
                    _Author of “Miss Jerry,” etc._

                    _WITH DESIGNS AND PHOTOGRAPHIC
                             ILLUSTRATIONS
                            BY THE AUTHOR_


                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                      NEW YORK: _M DCCC XC VIII_




                         _Copyright, 1898, by_
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

                         _All rights reserved_


                           University Press:
               JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.




                                  TO

                        _THE AMERICAN GIRL WHOM
                          I HAVE KNOWN BEST_

                                MY WIFE

                       _THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY
                          AND AFFECTIONATELY
                              DEDICATED_




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_The_ APOLOGY:


_It will be suspected, perhaps, that in saying “sketches,” I have
wished to escape some of the responsibility which might have been
incurred by a more formal approach to a momentous theme, though the
entire truth of the description should carry its own justification.
And if the term be permitted in describing the text, it has equal
appropriateness in describing the pictures; for the photograph seldom
can be more than a sketch, and must be content with the limitations
as well as with the privileges of the sketch. The feminine eye will
discern unaided by data the chronological range of my pictures. To
other eyes, possibly, I should explain that the portraits represent a
period of six or seven years, and that those in conventional dress are
supplemented by various costume sketches with the camera recalling eras
in which there was no photography. What I have said of the American
type in the first chapter will explain my own difficulty in expressing
the American type by the aid of the lens, a difficulty which has not
been diminished by the privilege of wide travel. If I have not revealed
the geographical identity of any of the types reflected here, the
reservation may, I hope, seem to be as fully justified as certain other
reservations which the American girl herself so frequently chooses to
hold._

_I often have wished that it were easier to substitute for “American”
some name which should more specifically indicate the United States. It
is the United States girl I am talking about; it is the United States
spirit which I have sought to discover, and not the spirit of the wider
America of which the foreigner, and even the British foreigner, so
frequently, and so reasonably, seems to be thinking when he uses the
name “American.” Now that Miss America for the first time has seen her
soldier brothers go abroad to fight and to conquer, it may be that in
one way or another there will be a further modification of the term, in
which direction it would be difficult to say at this hour._

_Because this is an apology and not a mere preface, I may be
permitted, I hope, to express to the American girls in various States
of the Union, from Boston to San Antonio, who have sat before my
camera, my regret that I should have translated them so inadequately.
It would, indeed, be hard to do justice to the American girl, and one
well might hesitate to describe, or even to discuss her, were not her
always gracious generosity so safely to be looked for._

    _A. B._




  [Illustration: CONTENTS


       I. THE AMERICAN TYPE        _Page_   1

      II. THE TWIG                         23

     III. A CENTURY’S RUN                  47

      IV. STITCHES AND LINKS               75

       V. “WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOCIETY”    95

      VI. LACE AND DESTINY                121

     VII. CHANCE AND CHOICE               143

    VIII. THE NEW OLD MAID                165

      IX. “AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED”      187]




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                                   I

                           THE AMERICAN TYPE


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The tradition that the women of the region in which we live illustrate
all of those traits that give an abiding charm to the sex, is one that
sometimes may be unreasonable, perhaps even comic; yet it cannot be
discreditable. Balzac, who remarks somewhere that nothing unites men
so much as a certain conformity of view in the matter of women, may
seem unphilosophical when he remarks somewhere else upon the absurdity
of English women. His French antipathy has an unreasonably affirmative
sting. But we do not care how many Thackerays regard the English girl
as the bright particular flower of creation. We like and expect the
author of “The Newcomes” to say: “I think it is not national prejudice
which makes me believe that a high-bred English lady is the most
complete of all Heaven’s subjects in this world.” For the same reason
we delight in N. P. Willis’s confidence when he declares that “there
is no such beautiful work under the sky as an American girl in her
bellehood.” And Mr. Willis adds with the same whimsical consciousness
of national partiality: “I _think_ I am not prejudiced.”

Of course this instinctive preference is fundamental. We are prepared
to hear from science that the African savage prefers the thick lips
and flat nose of the African girl to any other sort; that this is why
the African girl has a flat nose and thick lips; that gallantry is a
phase of natural selection, and so on. We can understand that there is
a merely relative difference of attitude between the savage lover who
woos his lady with a club, and the modern suitor who swears to give
up all of his clubs for her sake. What perplexes us is our anxiety to
explain our modern instinct, and (what is more perplexing) our anxiety
to explain _her_; to ascertain and even to catalogue her essential
traits--to discover, if not why we prefer the American girl, at least
what manner of girl it is that we thus are instinctively preferring.

What is the American type? Is the typical American girl as the British
novelist so often has described her--rich, noisy, wasp-waisted and
slangy? Is she a “Daisy Miller” or a “Fair Barbarian”? Is she what
Richard Grant White feared she too often was, “a creature composed in
equal parts of mind and leather”? Is she Emerson’s “Fourth of July of
Zoology,” or is she illustrating the discovery which Irving claimed to
have made among certain philosophers “that all animals degenerate in
America and man among the number”?

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From those foreigners who make a Cook’s tour examination of us, the
evidence in favor of the proposition that we grow more pretty and witty
women to the acre than any other country in the world, is overwhelming.
But there are obvious reasons why we must distrust this foreign
comment. Too often it plainly is a propitiatory item, when it is not
illustrating a flippant wish among men writers to occupy Disraeli’s
position “on the side of the angels.” That traveller has a profound
distaste for a country who does not find that it has pretty women.

If anything is more inevitable than this, it is that the traveller
will find fault with the type preferred by the men of the country he
is visiting. “What is most amazing,” says the observer in Zululand or
elsewhere, “is that the prettiest women, the women without this or that
hideous deformity, are not admired by the men.” The Kaffir prince on a
visit to England, or the Apache chief among the palefaces in the city
of the Great Father, invariably are astounded at the obtuseness of the
white men. I remember once listening to a group of New York artists who
were discussing preferred types of women, and it was agreed, with a
hopeless and resentful unanimity, that most New Yorkers preferred fat
women, since most of the good clothes and diamonds were worn by fat
women. All of which goes to show, perhaps, that natural selection is an
exclusive affair.

Probably even patriotism does not demand of us an admiration for the
beauty of the very first American girls--the dusky darlings of our
primitive tribes. These earliest American girls were not dowered with
the fatal gift of beauty as we understand beauty. Indeed, it is quite
generally admitted that the American Indian girl is not and never was
so pretty as the girls of some of the Pacific islands, for example.
Far be it from me to attack any precious traditions concerning the red
man, or the red woman, either. Far be it from me to touch with impious
hand the romantic panoply of Pocahontas. I am not writing a scientific
treatise. I have no point to prove. It is quite possible that there is
something distinctive in the personality of the Indian girl, whether
she be as poetry has painted her or as she stands in the analysis of
science. If I pass her by it is in no spirit of partisanship toward
either view. She is an old story, and some day when she is a new story
we may have occasion for surprise.

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The fact is that I must content myself here with a glance at the
American girl of more recent times, though she also will seem to be
an old story if we permit ourselves to remember the number of things
which have been said. We are not likely to forget the unction with
which foreign visitors sketched the daughters of Colonial America.
Indeed, we are in a measure dependent upon those sketches for a
knowledge of these ancestral daughters. As in all judgments of remote
appearances, we here must lean upon mere opinion. There was no camera
in the days of Priscilla, nor in the days of Dolly Madison, and painted
portraiture, unchallenged by the photograph, had reached heights of
admirable gallantry. For purposes of pictorial reconstruction we have
an enthusiastic description, the dubious confessions of a diary, a
charming little miniature or a mellowing canvas in an old frame, a
quaint gown, wrinkled by time; but we have no photograph. I hear
the Romanticist mutter, “Thank Heaven for _that_!” Alas! the
photograph is an expert witness, and how he can disagree! Was ever any
human specialist on the witness stand so dogmatic, so insinuating,
so sophistical as the photograph? Who, without an obstinately
anthropological mind, shall regret that the beginnings of our national
life are veiled in the Ante-Photographic era--that we may invest them
with qualities we wish they might have had, as well as with those
qualities of which we think we know? Who shall say that humanity, A.
P., dwelling in a softening haze beyond the harshly illuminated era of
Realism, is worse off than humanity thereafter? Looking at the matter
practically, who shall regret that Lady Washington never had her pretty
head in a vise, her face masked a ghastly white with powder to make
her countenance more actinic, and her eyes instructed to glare at a
fixed point for upward of sixty mortal seconds! Surely there are some
compensations in being handed down like the Iliad or the masonic ritual
by word of mouth rather than by agencies associated with the arrogant
stare of the lens.

But, after all, we do not conduct the trial wholly with expert
witnesses, and the camera has been a useful commentator--perhaps we
are more willing to say that it will be than that it has been, though
we never shall surpass in delicately literal perfection the image
of the daguerreotype. A new confusion may arise from the fact that
photography wants to be more than a science--is tired of being literal,
and seeks to be an art. If it shall become an art--that is to say, an
agency of personal opinion--posterity must, like ourselves, go on being
influenced in its judgments of pictorial fact by the expressions of
art, which the world has been doing from the beginning of time.

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Certainly it would be very hard for us to think of the English girl,
for example, however well we might know her personally, without feeling
the influence of the English artists, of Romney, and Reynolds, and
Sir John Millais, and Sir Frederick Leighton, and the multitudinous
expressions of her from the pencil of the author of “Trilby.” Du
Maurier’s English girl is an image, agreeable or not according to
one’s taste, which we cannot get out of our minds. A number of years
before he achieved a second fame by writing romances, Du Maurier made
a sketch in which he undertook to indicate his idea of a pretty woman.
He wrote of his ideal at that time: “She is rather tall, I admit, and
a trifle stiff; but English women _are_ tall and stiff just now;
and she is rather too serious; but that is only because I find it so
difficult, with a mere stroke of black ink, to indicate the enchanting
little curved lines that go from the nose to the mouth corners, causing
the cheeks to make a smile--and without them the smile is incomplete.”
I always have been glad to hear Mr. Ruskin say of the Venus of Melos,
with her “tranquil, regular and lofty features,” that she “could not
hold her own for a moment against the beauty of a simple English girl,
of pure race and kind heart.”

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And in the same way our notion of the American girl, of the typical
American girl, is inevitably affected by the pictures we see of her.
Our illustrators naturally have the best opportunity to mould our
judgments in this matter. I recall hearing one woman say of another at
a tea: “That girl is always sitting around in Gibson poses.” They used
to say the same thing in England of the girls who imitated Du Maurier.
Thus we see that the illustrator of life not only is reflecting but
creating forms and manners; and if you would know not merely what the
American girl is, but what she is going to be, study the picture-makers
and story-makers who influence her.

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Mr. Gibson would have us believe that Miss America is essentially a
statuesque girl, that, in general, there are good chances that she will
be tall, commanding, well-dressed, rather English in the shoulders. Mr.
Wenzell and Mr. Smedley present her to us as more willowy, with more of
what, if we had to go abroad for a prototype, we should be obliged to
call French grace and lightness. We have been under the spell of the
girl Castaigne can draw, have enjoyed the dainty femininity pictured by
Toaspern and Sterner and Mrs. Stephens. None has grudged a flattering
stroke, a prophetic outline. It is the old story. If we are to measure
a nation’s civilization by the degree of its deference to women, we
surely shall find much to confuse us in art, which in all lands, like
some joyous, enthusiastic child, always has heaped unstinted homage
at the feet of its goddesses, its Madonnas, its Magdalens and its
nymphs; which always has been ready to give to its fruit-venders and
flower-girls in the market-place the same refined beauty it bestows
upon its princesses; which has made its Pandoras beautiful with no
sign of resentment for any mischief its Pandoras ever may have done,
grateful only for the privilege of saying to the world as to her
precious private self, that she is very charming indeed. Germany, while
sending women to the plough, paints her radiantly as a deity, and when
England was selling wives at the end of a halter in the market-place,
there was no abatement in the ardor of her artistic tributes to
feminine loveliness.

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While the American artist has painted Miss America appreciatively,
with an enthusiasm creditable alike to his art and to his patriotism,
and seldom, surely, in the spirit of one who could say, “she _is_
rather stiff just now,” unquestionably, like the rest of us, he has
been bothered at times by the fact that she is so various, that she
has so many pictorial as well as temperamental and (may I say) vocal
variations.

There are several reasons why she should be various. The “Mayflower”
was a small ship and could not hold all of our ancestors. Like the
English who followed after the Conqueror, some of our ancestors had to
be content to “come over” at a later time, some of them at a shockingly
recent date. Thus we have greater divergences in type than exist in
countries wherein the “coming over” process was neither so protracted
nor from so many points of the compass. The American girl blossoms like
the pansy in so many and in such unexpected shades and combinations
that science falters, and bewildered art, determined to paint types
that will “stay put,” bolts for Brittany and sulkily draws sabots and
the Norman nose. We are a vast anthropological department store in
which the polite sociological clerk will show you human goods, not
only in the primary colors, but in every conceivable tint and texture;
and when you ask him, Is this foreign or domestic? he lies to meet the
requirements. Yes, Miss America sometimes, like our cotton, “comes
over” a second time with a foreign label, which _is_ puzzling!

It is our habit to think that the American girl of English ancestry
presents precisely the right modification of the--what shall I call
it?--austerity of the purely English type, and which scorns the
melancholy of Burne-Jones and Rossetti. The American girl of German
parents is conspicuously with us, and very often is found supplying a
fascinatingly fair phase without which our galaxy scarcely would be
complete, adding a delightful sparkle to the demureness which we might
not find so modified in Berlin or Bremen. The American girl of French
parentage is found uniting the traits of the people which has produced
De Staël, and Récamier and George Sand, to the perhaps not greatly
different vivacity of l’Américaine. We trace the auburn tresses of the
Scottish lass, the teasing Irish eyes, the winsome oval of the Dutch
face. We see the too emphatic contrasts of the Spanish, the Italian
and the Russian types mellowed and refined; while Oriental blood, the
civilized African, the octoroon and the occasional Asiatic each add an
element of picturesque variety.

And this is not saying a word about the differentiating fact that
this is a big country, and that Miss America in one section is by no
means the same as Miss America in another. I do not mean to say that
when we meet her in or from Boston we always know her by sight, but
when we come to average her in that neighborhood we are able to see
clearly enough that her quality is distinctive, that it is different
from the quality of Miss America elsewhere--in New York, for example,
where, by a trivial tradition, she is supposed to lay less stress upon
intellectuality, but where, under whatever guise of habit or manner,
you will find that she knows enough and has what she knows sufficiently
at her command to make you nervous. Again, the Philadelphia girl upsets
your preconceived notions, if you are foolish enough to have these,
by being nothing that suggests even remote relationship to the bronze
Quaker on the municipal tower. It is the familiar joke that the Boston
girl asks what you know, that the New York girl asks what you own,
and that the Philadelphia girl asks who your grandfather was. If this
amiable satire should have any foundation in fact, I wonder what the
Chicago girl is expected to ask. I myself have a theory, not wholly
dissociated from experience, that she does not ask anything, being
content to know that she, personifying the great traditionless middle
west, has been called the hardest riddle of them all.

And, as I have said, we must admit that geography has much to do with
the case. Does any one deny that climate and history have made the
Kentucky girl a being apart--that the Kentucky horses which she has
ridden with so much spirit have had their effect in her whole style and
personality? Could we fail to look for a distinctive flowering in the
verdant slopes beyond the Sierras or amid that intensely American human
environment on the plains of Texas? Have you heard the Creole sing?
Have you heard the music of the Georgia girl’s talk? Have you ever let
a Virginia girl drive you, or danced with Miss Maryland?

A southern dance! Perhaps it is inevitable that we should find
ourselves thinking of the Continental and early Federal society;
of old Georgetown and the powdered heads, and the minuet, and the
blinking candles behind the darkey orchestra; of the clinking swords
of the young Revolutionary soldiers, and the satin breeches of the
foreign lordlings, studying the precocious young republic and the
young republic’s daughters: of the quaint gowns Miss America used to
wear, and the taunting little caps and head-dresses, reflecting now
the whimsies of the Empire, now the furbelows of the Restoration, and
always her engagingly different self. Yes, time is working its
wizard tricks up and down the land, slowly here and quickly there,
now (as it might seem) in a romantic spirit, and again in brusque
paradoxical contrast to the thing we expect.

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We live quickly hereabouts, and to say that the vast changes which have
taken place in our national life have been mostly external is not to
say that the spectacle is on that account any easier to understand.
In an especial degree social situation with us, like the age limit
defining old maids, is wholly relative, subject to continual change.
To the foreign spectator who ignores this relativity, the American
girl naturally is bewildering, and we are likely to find her typified
in foreign comment in the words which Schlegel irreverently applied
to Portia, as a “rich, beautiful, clever heiress.” No, the typical
American girls are not all heiresses, nor all cow-camp heroines.
They were not always demure in the colonies, nor are they always
disconcertingly self-possessed in our own time. The girls with whom
Lafayette went sled-riding on the Newburg hills do not actually appear
to have been amazingly different from those who teased the Prince
of Wales in the fifties (I mean _our_ fifties), nor from those
who sent in their cards to Li Hung Chang in the nineties. It is very
shocking to us moderns, who let women preach and plead and vote,
to learn of the number of elopements in the days when women were
theoretically tethered to the spinning-wheel and forbidden everything
but hypocrisy. Which is to say, perhaps, that how much we shall regard
as distinctive in the modern woman may depend upon how little we happen
to know of the woman who has gone before.

But time and place must leave their mark, and Miss America, though
she be like changeable silk, of varying hue in varying lights,
is undoubtedly, being the precocious product of a new era in new
territory, a new variety in the species, as new as if she were
grotesquely instead of subtly different. And in her presence the
American himself frequently seems to be awed and quelled, like the
Greek hero when Athena’s “dreadful eyes shone upon him.” His devotion
to her has excited derision; his deference has been misconstrued,
his boastful admiration has been catalogued as characteristic. Italy
once spoke of England as “the paradise of women”; and England in a
later day began to say the same thing about the United States, which
may or may not have something to do with the “star of empire,” and
probably, in any case, has some definite relation to the Anglo-Saxon
spirit, concerning which so much has been said of late. As for Miss
America herself, the sovereignty at which the foreign observer marvels
is a real appearance, however profound the misapprehension of its
philosophy. Miss America is no illusion, if some spectators have
doubted their senses.

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By the grace of nature she is that she is. If the American man
continues to pay her the supreme compliment of not understanding her,
that is his affair. It always is easier to perceive the other’s
folly than our own--especially when the exciting cause is a woman. We
know better than the spectator why _we_ permit certain seeming
tyrannies! We analyze the American girl in a purely Pickwickian
spirit, not because we expect actually to discover facts, but for the
immediate pleasure of the speculation. We neither seek nor assume to
comprehend this marvellous organism. We know better. When we pretend
to delineate the American girl it is in the spirit of Fielding’s
aside in “Tom Jones”: “We mention this observation not with any view
of pretending to account for so odd a behavior, but lest some critic
should hereafter plume himself on discovering it.”

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                                  II

                               THE TWIG


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As I said one day to the Professor--

But first I must tell you about the Professor. She is a young
woman--young even in an era that classes authors among the “younger
writers” until they are sixty, and is pushing the “proper age at which
to marry” into the period of severe and undebatable maturity. She
is young, but she exemplifies that educated precocity tolerated and
fostered by our era. She knows the past like a book and the present
like a man. She does not vulgarly bristle with knowledge like the
first products of the higher education. Her acquirements sit upon her
less like starched linen than like a silken gown that flows with the
figure. She is the educated woman in her “second manner,” as the art
critics would say. I do not know what the educated woman’s third manner
will be. No one acquainted with the charms of the Professor could help
hoping that there never would be any.

The Professor graduated and post-graduated. She pottered in
laboratories, and at certain intervals wholly disappeared into the very
abysses of science. She read law tentatively, and made a feint at going
into medicine, but was deterred in each case, I fancy, by the fact,
repugnant to her exuberant energy, that a practice had to grow and
could not be mastered ready made. At one time there were both hopes and
fears that she would enter the ministry. Those who hoped banked on her
earnestness and wisdom. Those who feared quailed before her ruthless
independence and sense of humor. She delighted in the paradox of not
scorning social life, welcoming Emerson’s admonition with regard to
solitude and society by keeping her head in one and her hands in the
other. Indeed, she dances remarkably well when we consider that here
the dexterity is so far removed from the brain, and I have seen her
swim like--a mermaid, I suppose. She took a long course in cookery
for the pleasure of more pungently abusing certain of her lecture
audiences. One day when the plumbers didn’t come I saw her actually
“wipe a joint” in lead pipe with her own hands. Heaven knows where she
picked _that_ up!

When she accepted the position at the Academy, doubtless it was with a
view to certain liberties of action in the sociological direction. She
was not quite through with the college settlement idea, and I suspect
that she had a feeling that city politics at close range might be
productive to her in certain ways. Because she is neither erratic nor
formidable, she has experienced various offers of marriage, and has
shed them all without visible disturbance. Just at present, panoplied
in learning, tingling with modernity, yet always charmingly unconscious
of her power, she stands, poised and easy, like a sparrow on a live
wire.

In other words the Professor is one of those rare women with whom
you may enjoy the delights of a purely impersonal quarrel. She can
wrangle affectionately and cleave you in twain with a tender sisterly
smile. Indeed, she can make you feel of intellectual fisticuffs,
and, notwithstanding an occasional effect of too greatly accentuated
excitement, that it is, on the whole, a superior pleasure. And you
arise again conscious that she has no greater immediate grudge against
you than against St. Paul or any other of her historical opponents.

One day I asked the Professor, not with any controversial inflection,
what she thought of Herbert Spencer, a bachelor, talking about the
rearing of children.

“Well,” said the Professor, “it certainly is no more absurd than the
spectacle of Herbert Spencer analyzing love, or Ernest Renan doing the
same thing.”

“Mind you,” I went on, “I don’t say that the unmarried may not discuss
with entire competency--”

“I hope not,” interrupted the Professor. “I hope you wouldn’t say any
such absurd thing. Must a man have robbed a bank to write intelligently
of penology?”

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“My point is,” I went on--the Professor and I never take the slightest
offence at each other’s interruptions--“my point is that it almost
seems at times as if the unmarried should, in such an emergency,
assume, if they did not feel, a certain diffidence. To tell you the
truth, Professor, if it were not for you, I should doubt whether the
unmarried had a developed sense of humor.”

“That is simply pitiful,” flung the Professor. “Can you not see that
it is a sense of humor that keeps many people from marrying? But
that is not the point. Who is better fitted than Mr. Spencer, who
has enjoyed freedom from an entangling alliance, who is unbiased by
social situation or personal obligation, to discuss with scientific
judiciality the problems of child-rearing?”

“Theoretically, Professor, that is all right. But when Mr. Spencer
advises more sugar, it is awfully hard to forget that Mr. Spencer
never, presumably never, sat up nights with a youngster who had the
toothache. It is all very well for Mr. Spencer to suggest that when a
child craves more sugar it probably needs more sugar, but the parent
who manages his offspring on that basis is going to lose sleep. A good
rule, if you will permit me a platitude, is a rule that works. The way
that children _should_ be brought up is the way they _can_ be
brought up.”

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“My friend,” said the Professor--

Now, I am several years older than the Professor. By sheer age I am
entitled to her deference; but the Professor can ignore years as
well as sex or previous condition of servitude. Her impersonality is
adjusted to time, to space, and to matter. I am simply a Person.

“My friend,” said the Professor, “it is another platitude that there
is a right way to do everything, even to bring up children. The way
children are brought up probably is not right, and no theory or method
of bringing them up is, of course, or could be more than relatively
right. But in getting as near the right as we humanly may there is no
wisdom in despising the advice of the spectator. The man digging a
hole in the ground may be less competent than a man not in the hole
to perceive that presently the earth is going to cave in. As a matter
of fact, old maids, for example, have been known to bring up children
very well indeed, for the reason, possibly, that nothing is more
detrimental to successful authority over children than relationship to
them. All experience shows that the scientific, the abstract management
of children is more successful, in the average, than the traditional
parental method. This scientific method, I need not say, is not less
kindly than the other; it actually is more kindly. Witness the absolute
triumph of kindergartens--”

“Now, Professor,” I interposed, foreseeing the spectacle of Froebel
and Plato moving down arm-in-arm between the Professor’s periods,
“understand me--”

“A very difficult thing at times,” she murmured.

“Understand me--I am speaking now with my eye on the American child.”

“And _that_,” twinkled the Professor, “requires some dexterity.”

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“The American child,” I pursued, “is accused by many of threatening
our destruction, and if the American view of rearing children is
wrong or requires modification, this radical suggestion of Mr. Spencer,
looking to greater rather than less liberty in making terms with the
instincts of children, becomes a matter for serious concern. If the
American idea has stood for anything it is more sugar--that is to say,
yielding something to the instinct, the personality of the child. I
think we have gone a long way with it. Our children are becoming very
self-possessed. Sometimes I have qualms. Take the American girl child--”

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“A vast subject,” commented the Professor.

“The American girl child is getting a good deal of sugar--figuratively.
The question comes, Is it good for her? Is her freedom, her undomestic
training, her intellectual development, to the advantage of the race?
I believe with Mr. Ruskin that you can’t make a girl lovely unless you
make her happy. But how can we expect her to know what will make her
happy? Aren’t you afraid, Professor, that she is becoming a trifle
frivolous? Of course you yourself are a living contradiction--”

“Don’t try to deceive me,” warned the Professor. “I perceive in what
you say, not the doubts of an incipient cynic, but the remorse of a
doting and indulgent man. Most really typical American men are in
the same situation. They are wondering if they haven’t overdone it,
and, being too busy to find out for themselves, are eager for outside
judgment, upon which they may act, _de jure_. The vice of the
American man is his indulgence of the American girl. The foreigner
commiseratingly thinks that the American girl demands this indulgence.
The American man in his secret soul knows that he has pampered her for
his own pleasure, and because, to a busy man, pampering is easier than
regulating.”

“Yes,” I complained, “in the new paradise Adam is always to blame.”

“No,” protested the Professor, “not always; just humanly often.
And don’t think that you have invented this modern anxiety for the
welfare of girl children. Before and since ‘L’Éducation des Filles,’
they all have been ‘harping on my daughter.’ Women have been even
more despairing than men. Hannah More thought that ‘the education
of the present race of females’ was ‘not very favorable to domestic
happiness.’ Mrs. Stowe thought ‘the race of strong, hearty, graceful
girls’ was daily decreasing, and that in its stead was coming ‘the
fragile, easily fatigued, languid girls of the modern age, drilled in
book learning and ignorant in common things.’ Now that sort of thing
has been going on since our race stopped speaking with the arboreal
branch of the family. There is perpetual opportunity for a treatise
on ‘The Antiquity of New Traits.’ We are apt to think that we of this
era have invented the idea of educating girls, but civilized children
always have been educated early in something. Nowadays it is in
science. In our colonial days it was in piety. Miss Repplier, who
has a most relishable antipathy for prigs, in fiction and in life,
reminds us of Cotton Mather’s son, who ‘made a most edifying end in
praise and prayer at the age of two years and seven months,’ and of
Phoebe Bartlett, who was ‘ostentatiously converted at four.’ You are
not sorry to be rid of all that, are you?”

  [Illustration]

“No,” I assented, “most assuredly I am not. It is pretty hard to find
the Juvenile Prig on this soil nowadays outside of the most inhuman
‘books for the young.’ And we all are glad of it. You may remember the
passage in the Chesterfield letters in which the father writes to the
son: ‘To-morrow, if I am not mistaken, you will attain your ninth year;
so that for the future I shall treat you as a _youth_. You must
now commence a different course of life, a different course of studies.
No more levity; childish toys and playthings must be thrown aside, and
your mind directed to serious objects. What was not unbecoming of a
child would be disgraceful of a youth.’ We certainly have outgrown that
view of things, and the American youngster comes nearer being without
hypocrisy than any product of civilization that I ever have studied.
But what have we in place of the piety and affectation? What is the
working result of so much independence? Are not the American girl
children, as well as the boys, a trifle irreverent?”

  [Illustration]

“Yes, I know,” admitted the Professor, “the American child often
seems a shade too unawed. Balzac says somewhere that modesty is a
relative virtue--there is ‘that of twenty years, that of thirty
years, and that of forty years.’ Our ancestors believed in a severe,
hypocritical modesty for the young, trusting that they would get over
it. They did worse than that when they asked youth to anticipate the
hypocrisies of age. The same elegant person whom you have just quoted
once wrote to that same son: ‘Having mentioned laughing, I want most
particularly to warn you against it; and I could heartily wish that you
may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live.’
Although Chesterfield insisted that he was ‘neither of a melancholy
or cynical disposition,’ he was proud to be able to say to his boy
‘Since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard
me laugh.’ The next time you feel inclined to say mean things about
the Puritans remember that declaration by the Earl. Now, the American
seems to me not only to look at children differently, but to look at
life differently, and any new traits in the American child probably
represent one fact as much as the other. The American idea--I say
idea, but I mean the American habit; we explain our habits and call
the explanation a theory--merely obliterates age discriminations.
The American child is simply the diminutive American. The American
girl is her mother writ small. I don’t think that she is a whit more
independent or irreverent than her mother.”

  [Illustration]

“You don’t mean to say, Professor, that a child should not, for
instance, be taught to keep a proper silence in company.”

“Not an absolute silence. A child either has a right to be in a
company or it has not. If it is in the company it has a right to be
articulate like the other members of the company. If it is a sensible
child it will listen to its elders, not because they are its elders
but because they are its betters, because they know more, are more
competent to speak. If it is not sensible it will be made to suffer
for its foolishness, just as older members of the company are made to
suffer. From my observation, children naturally brought up take their
reasonable place very naturally in company.”

“My fear is, Professor, that your naturalistic method overlooks
much of what we have become accustomed to think when we speak of
‘breeding.’ Now, children, even American children, do not acquire
this instinctively. Breeding includes restraint, externally applied
restraint--I don’t mean applied with a slipper or a rattan, though
restraint to have a really fine catholicity should, in my opinion,
include these symbols--but restraint inculcated by a wise, or at least
a wiser, authority. I believe sincerely that we have, in the past,
tried to bend the twig too far. But the beneficial results of guiding
twigs has been, I think, indisputably proved. Taking away too many
guides and supports must have its dangers. I think of these things
when I see the unhampered American girl of to-day. She is a lovely
spectacle. Yet I sometimes wonder, in a trite and old-fashioned way,
if her sort of training or absence of training is going to make her a
woman who will know how to manage a household and children. I can see
clearly enough that she is going to know how to manage a husband; but
the house--and the children--”

The Professor was musing. “Your anxiety makes me think of the early
criticisms of the kindergarten. ‘What!’ they used to exclaim, ‘a mob
of unmanageable brats and no ferule?’ Yet it is so. Your misgivings
overlook, I think, the latitudes of training, the obligations of
breeding. The American seems to me to be guiding his children as he
guides his civic affairs, not by brute force but by giving and taking.
If his child is born with the right to the pursuit of happiness, he
believes in starting the pursuit early. I suppose that children in the
United States have greater liberty than children in any other country.
The conferring of liberty has its dangers, and those who confer it
cannot expect to escape the obligations that go with the gift. It has
cost the American some annoyance to confer liberty and privileges on
grown-up folks from various quarters. If he decides--and he does so
quite reasonably I think--to include his children, he is bound to stand
with the emancipated.”

“Professor,” I said, “your words are soothing. They are alluringly
optimistic. I don’t want to reform the American child. I like him--and
especially her--as at present conditioned. I believe that the
irreverence is largely a seeming irreverence--an irreverence toward
traditions rather than toward people and principles; which simply is
saying what we should say of grown-up Americans. And I believe that in
any case the boy will knock his way out somehow. But the girl--I am not
doubting her; I am not believing that she is so petted a darling as
Paul Bourget, for instance, seems to think she is. I am not questioning
the intrinsic charm of her style, the piquing prophecies of her mind,
the perfection of her beauty, the delight of her companionship; I am
wondering whether this immediately agreeable sort of product is going
to meet the requirements of life as it is opening up to us in this
land, if--”

“Well,” swung in the Professor, “if you were going to have a worry, it
is a pity you couldn’t have had a new one--the new ones keep us busy
enough. You are very trite this time. You sound like a reformer--”

“Heaven forbid!” I cried.

“--and a reformer nowadays has a passion for beginning on the
children. Please don’t. Some of these reforming women remind me of
the advertisement in the London paper: ‘Bulldog for sale. Will eat
anything. Very fond of children.’ These reforming women will reform
anything--and they are very fond of children.”

“It is particularly the American girl,” I went on, “who is illustrating
the modern yearning to skip intervals, to ignore the ordinary processes
of time. She is like Horace Walpole, who found that the deliberation
with which trees grow was ‘extremely inconvenient to his natural
impatience.’ It doesn’t seem to make any difference how rigidly her
‘coming out’ time is fixed, she is getting to be a woman before her
time. Mark me, Professor, she knows too much, she--”

“A strictly masculine anxiety, sir.”

“--she knows too much, to the exclusion of some other things she
doesn’t know.”

  [Illustration]

“Now _don’t_ mention the kitchen,” cried the Professor, “I am
dreadfully tired of that.”

“No, Professor, her general cleverness always seems to me to make the
kitchen anxiety needless to a great extent. I mean that in knowing so
much and assuming so much the American girl child may be missing some
of that sweetness that for her lies in a more old-fashioned girlhood.
As a kind of unbent twig she is losing some of the more dependent
happiness belonging to her and not grudged to her. Mind you, Professor,
if a crime has been committed, I am accessory--”

“I began with that assumption,” remarked the Professor.

“--and I am hoping that there has been no crime, that the unbent twig
is growing all right on its own account, that our spoiled daughters,
weary of privilege, may be longing to serve, that if her modesty is
not expressed in meek eyes ‘full of wonder,’ her lofty glance is not,
Hermes-like, given to lying. Whatever the future may have in store,
she at least is what she seems to be. Her sentiments may sometimes be
irreverent, but they are her own. Perhaps the reason she seems more of
an individual than the archetypal girl is, as you have suggested, that
we have stripped her of the hypocrisy by which she pretended not to be
a unit but only the mute shadow of a unit.”

“O, you will come around!” chuckled the Professor.

“‘Come around,’ Professor? You mean sink back into the Slough of
Idolatry. I feel it in my bones that in spite of a gleam of intelligent
interrogation as to the wisdom of pampering the American girl, I am
going to keep right on--”

“You mean, if you will be honest,” blurted the Professor, “that you
will keep on letting her alone as you do the boy child. That is all.
Own up. The most that you have done is cease the special repression of
the girl. For better or for worse the American has done simply that:
forget sex in rearing his young.”

  [Illustration]

“Ah, Professor! when we forget sex are we not in danger of a costly
transgression? Are we not combating nature?”

“On the contrary, my friend, you are ceasing to combat nature. There
is nothing nature is more definitely certain to do than to look out
for sex on her own account. Is not all of creation trying to teach us
this lesson? Is not all of creation trying to teach us the folly and
the futility of meddling? Let nature alone. She knows her business. Sex
duality is universal. No amount of sitting up nights will help you to
think out a way of successfully interfering.”

I looked at the Professor. She is very much a woman. She suggested
a type that had been “let alone.” She is not a freak. Both her body
and her mind are well dressed, and she is good to look upon. To look
upon her sometimes fills me with a certain misgiving. But it is not a
misgiving for her.

“And yet,” it came to me to say, though not precisely in rebuke, “there
is such a thing as human humility.”

  [Illustration]

“Humility?” The Professor looked over at me with affected scorn. “Then
illustrate it, please. I cannot see the humility of interference. The
American does not repress his daughter. You admit that you like the
result. Why wrinkle your brow in contemplation of the future? Why not
believe that what seems to be true is true, that the American girl
flourishes agreeably in her freedom? Give her the natural privileges
bestowed elsewhere throughout creation. Let her _grow_. She is
not like Jupiter, without seasons. And you must take one of her seasons
at a time.”

“Professor,” I said solemnly, “you remember Artemis?”

“Yes,” she returned with equal solemnity, “and I remember the daughters
of Pandareas.”

  [Illustration]




  [Illustration]




                                  III

                            A CENTURY’S RUN


  [Illustration]

We are a very young nation, yet we have a past. In popular acceptance
we have little to live down, which should be a comfort. Just at present
there is a tendency to be disrespectful toward the past, to smile at
ancestral pretension, to humanize the Fathers of the Republic, to sneer
at the straw and bones on the floor of King Arthur’s dining hall, to
uncover the littleness of the ancient giants, to question the beauty
of the ancient heroines. Probably this needed to be done, particularly
in defence of the abused Present, which always hitherto has had a hard
time of it. “Every age since the golden,” says George Eliot, “may be
made more or less prosaic by minds that attend only to the vulgar and
sordid elements, of which there are always an abundance, even in
Greece and Italy, the favorite realms of the respective optimists.” The
author of “Romola” was willing not to have lived sooner, and to possess
even Athenian life “solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity.”

But even the past, sinfully boastful and complacent as it appears, has
rights which we must make some show of respecting, and we need not
too effusively applaud the present. Possibly the one good excuse for
finding out and confessing the whole truth about the past, is the need
to show, at whatever cost, that neither all of our vices nor all of our
virtues are entirely new. The passion for discovery is so strong that
some one always is ready to prove that the most trite and fundamental
of traits are absolutely novel, and the same passion appears in the
unction with which the pretension is ridiculed and overthrown. I talked
one day with a distinguished American historian, who confessed that the
supreme difficulty for the commentator on human character and events
was that arising from a tendency to “think disproportionately well of
facts which he himself has discovered.” Admit this to be a human trait
and we have a sufficient explanation of the ardor of the discoverer.

Now, no man can regard as insignificant any fact concerning woman,
disproportionate as the importance of the fact may be made to appear
in comparison with other facts concerning her, so that we have no
greater difficulty in appreciating the noisy announcement of the New
Woman than in appreciating the only less audible contention that there
is no such appearance. Happily the foolish discussion is over. Only
a few catch-words now remind us of the hopeless debate. Of course,
Eve was the only new woman. She alone was incontrovertibly new; and
to seek by trick of title to invest with newness any woman who came
after her, was a frivolous and degenerate conspiracy. Not, indeed, that
newness is intrinsically a defect, though heraldry and afternoon teas
may be arranged upon that assumption; but in effect it is belittling,
destructive of certain benefits of the doubt, insulting to the woman of
the past and skeptical as to the woman of the present.

However, our national past and our national present are so full of
superficial and even of fundamental contrasts, that if ever a merciful
sentence is to be passed upon one who, peering through the “turbid
media” of sociological analysis, mistakes the _Zeitgeist_ for a
new woman, it is in our own longitudes. Like a child growing up under
the eye of an arrogant and pompous parent, we have, nationally, been
made to feel from the beginning that we are new, even tentative, that
we are unclassified, all but vagrant in the ethnological sense. It is
possible that recent events will modify in certain important ways,
external contemplation of us as a nation, that, in spite of certain new
effects which we may be accused of producing, a consciousness and a
recognition of our definite maturity may have some responsive effect in
ourselves.

Meanwhile it is pleasantly easy to detect many interesting changes in
the situation of the American girl within the span of the century.
Whether she merely illustrates the social and political changes which
have taken place, or, as we so often have been urged to believe,
actually indicates why they have taken place, she presents a spectacle
of peculiar interest, a spectacle which has so successfully piqued
the analytical spirit of the period that it would be expounding the
commonplace to do more than quickly sketch a few of the outlines.

We have seen her bidding good-bye to the schoolma’am at a time when any
education was good enough for a girl,--good enough not only because
neither the kitchen nor the drawing-room exacted Greek, but because
heavier pabulum would utterly ruin her mental digestion; and we have
seen her at a later time when no education is too good for her, bidding
good-bye to an army of instructors at commencement time, radiant in her
cap and gown, the class song ringing pleasantly in her ears, the breath
of June in her life, with a crisp diploma to symbolize her triumphs.
In fact, we have seen the morality of educating her dismissed as a
settled question, and the matter of the quantity and quality left to
the perhaps not easy but at least final arbitrament of her individual
capacity.

  [Illustration]

We have seen her yield up to strenuous and inventive man, one by one,
various and many offices once regarded as essentially domestic, and
even as bounding that debatable domain, her “sphere”; we have seen
the spinning wheel go into the garret and come down again years later,
pertly polished, with pink ribbons on the distaff and spindle; we have
seen the superseded milkmaid gathering bottled cream at the basement
door, the superseded seamstress wearing a man-made jacket; and all
without audible murmur at the displacement.

  [Illustration]

We have seen the trained nurse succeed Sairy Gamp, many nostrums
disappearing gratefully in the transformation, and have found in
the new sisterhood of bedside saints a cheering sign of a finer
civilization, a prophecy of the future of medicine. We have seen the
amanuensis penning “Paradise Lost” and law briefs and grave history and
exhausting letters--the amanuensis celebrated in sentimental fiction
and unsentimental commerce, fulfil the promise of her own invaluable
service in the modern typewriter, whose little white fingers help move
the lever of the great mercantile machine, without whom modern trade
could scarcely stir, and whose taking away would rob all business life
of an inestimably sweetening influence.

We have seen her needle placed in the jaws of a machine, and have
seen her yoked with men in service to this iron master. We have
seen her leave the fireside armchair to climb the tall stool of
the counting-room and the railway station. We have seen the bodkin
displaced by the scalpel, the lace cap by the mortar-board, the apron
by the vestment. We have seen her emerge from the shadows of the
sanctuary to speak in the councils of the elders, we have seen her
hurry the breakfast dishes to go and vote.

We have seen her, once content to be the theme of art, become a master
of every medium, even of architecture, and throwing aside at last, and
without petulance, the insulting tributes that come under a sex label.
We have seen her, once forbidden to read newspapers, successful in
making them; committing errors, but under bad counsel and direction
rather than by any failure of her own taste, and winning highest honors
in journalistic art and conflict.

  [Illustration:

    _The_ Amanuensis
    of
    the Past]

  [Illustration:

    The Amanuensis
    of
    the Present]

The philosophy of all these changes naturally is complex and difficult.
It is a truism to remark that the danger always is of assuming that
they mean more than they do. We perhaps instinctively measure a change
by the mere picturesqueness of the contrast. We require to be reminded
much that humanity changes very little from century to century,
that whatever the appearances, great revolutions in human sentiment
and motive probably have not happened. No student of human
nature comes oftener upon any discovery than upon that of the simple
persistence in the twilight of the century of the old human instincts
that prevailed at the dawn. So that we need not think to find in all
these new clothes any greatly different people. When the century’s
clock strikes the hundredth year, and Father Time, acting as master of
ceremonies, shouts “Masks off!” there, among all the masqueraders, are
the same faces that have grown familiar in the every-day of life.

If the reader detects in this attitude any wish to escape the burdens
of an explanation, an anxiety to dodge the awful Why? in all these
outward modifications of Miss America, he, and especially she, is quite
at liberty to do so, for, as I perhaps have indicated, and must repeat
defensively from time to time, definitely to explain Miss America is
farthest from my thoughts; though I cannot deny an intention, which
doubtless appeared at an early stage, to express respectfully certain
untested, and, it may be, actually impulsive, personal opinions
regarding her. To refrain from exercising such a privilege under
circumstances which forbid interruption would be superhuman.

More interesting to me at the moment are some appearances already
fairly familiar, yet new in garb and situation. The young woman in
new lights and new places has a natural fascination. I realized this
vividly one day in the hotel of a Western city, when I became conscious
that an unusual guest had arrived. She was a sturdy young woman,
yet delicate of feature, with a mild, undismayed blue eye. She came
swinging into the hotel, a darkey lad at her russet shoe heels with a
telescope bag. She herself carried a sleek yellow satchel which she
placed in front of the desk. She wrote her name in a firm, small hand,
took a heap of letters handed to her by the clerk, and dropped into a
near-by chair to open several of them with a quick flip of her gloved
finger. In no way was she radically dressed. Her tailor-made suit was
of a fine cloth, richly trimmed. Her clothes, like her manner, had not
an unnecessary touch. Later, I saw her interviewing the porter, who
presently was rolling three large sample trunks into one of those first
floor rooms provided by certain hotels for the use of drummers, whose
goods for display cannot well be taken upstairs. I saw her come in at
different times with three different shopkeepers, and others came,
evidently by appointment, to inspect many rolls of carpet which soon
littered the display room.

  [Illustration: Thanksgiving Day: Old Style]

  [Illustration: Thanksgiving Day: New Style]

“She’s a trump!” muttered the clerk, with an admiring glance across the
corridor; “the best drummer Warp & Woof ever had. She succeeded one of
their New York men, and she beat his orders by forty thousand dollars
the first year. And there’s no fooling about her either. She doesn’t
try to mesmerize the customers, though she’s pretty enough to do that
if she cared to. She simply makes them want the goods, and she sells so
square that she doesn’t have any trouble coming back to the same
people.”

“Is she a single woman?” I asked. Something in this inquiry amused the
clerk. Then he said: “Well, they say she’s engaged to a drummer for
Felt, Feathers & Co., and that if they ever manage to get into Chicago
at the same time they will get married.”

One day in mid-Missouri a lean, brown, bare-footed boy was driving me
across country to a railway station. Suddenly the boy said: “We ain’t
goin’ t’ have no dog show.”

“No?” The boy shook his head. Presently he added: “And that girl’s dead
sore on this town.”

“What girl?” I demanded.

The boy turned to me with a look of incredulity. “Didn’t you see ’er?”

“You don’t mean that girl in the blue dress that was at the hotel
breakfast this morning?”

“That’s her, yes.”

I remembered that she had very dark eyes, and no color; that she wore
an Alpine hat and a neat gown, that she looked straight before her with
an almost sullen expression when she spoke to the waiter.

“I drove her over to Bimley’s,” the boy said, “and she sat there where
you are for two miles without saying a word. Then she turned at me
quick and says, ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ and I said yes I had, just
one. Then she said, ‘Have yer got a match?’ and I give her that, and
she smoked for a long time without sayin’ anything. After a while she
let out and said this was the meanest, low-down town she ever struck,
that they was meaner’n dirt here, especially the college, and that she
never wanted t’ see it n’r hear of it agin. Yer see, she goes from one
town to another and gits up dog shows for the people that have fine
dogs, and they have the town band, an’ lemonade an’ cake an’ prizes.
Anyway, she had a hard time stirrin’ them up here; but she could have
got through all right only for the president of the college. He said he
wouldn’t let the girls go, and that settled it. They gave it up after
this girl’d blown in a two days’ bill at the hotel, and she got mad and
lit out. Well, she quieted down agin before we got to Bimley’s, and
when we was in the hollow by Moresville I looked at her and she was
cryin’.”

One other glimpse: Miss Linnett was the typewriter at Stoke Brothers’.
At first she had been just the typewriter, coming highly recommended
from the typewriter school. She appeared at the minute of nine and went
away at the minute of five, unless one of the Stokes stayed beyond that
hour, or late letters and the copying book delayed her. She unvaryingly
dressed in black, wore her brown hair simply in a knot, and in the
depth of winter always had a flower of some sort on her table. The
elder Stoke was feeble, and his eyesight grew to be so poor that she
read his letters to him. The junior Stoke would never let her take
formal dictation, preferring to give her the gist of what he wanted to
say and letting her put it in her own way. In this habit they both came
greatly to depend upon her. After a time, too, her growing knowledge of
the business induced the cashier and bookkeeper to go to her in certain
contingencies, and she acquired, without either seeking or rejecting
it, various discretionary powers in regard to the machinery of the
business. If anything went wrong they resorted to Miss Linnett. If old
Stoke forgot anything Miss Linnett was a second memory to him. If the
younger Stoke was in a hurry he would hand over the letters to Miss
Linnett to answer as she saw fit. She knew all the correspondents of
the house and their prejudices. She knew the combination of old Stoke’s
private safe after Stoke himself had forgotten it. She had a way of her
own in putting away documents, and nobody ever thought of studying the
scheme. She met all of these obligations with a dispassionate serenity,
and everything she did was done with an easy and amiable quickness. She
became the brain centre of the office. She was Stoke Brothers.

Then one night she broke down, fainted, there before old Stoke, who
fell on his knees beside her and wept in real anguish while the little
white bookkeeper ran for a doctor, and the cashier tremblingly fetched
water to sprinkle her face. When she did not come the next day at nine
the situation in the office was pitiful. Old Stoke was useless, and the
younger Stoke shifted his letters from one hand to the other in utter
misery. The bookkeeper and cashier fumbled through their work dazed and
unstrung. In the days of doubt that followed the situation grew more
gloomy. There was great excitement when one morning she came down town
in a cab, white and fluttering, and, leaning on the bookkeeper’s arm,
made her way from the elevator to the office. She smiled at the little
group, accepted the homage quietly, insisted on showing them where
certain papers were, promised them that she should be back very soon,
and went away again, old Stoke patting her hand and telling her to be
careful. At the end of the month she died.

“What did they ever do without her?” I asked when I had heard the story.

“They didn’t do without her. Stoke Brothers went out of business. I
suppose they had been thinking of doing that; they were pretty well on
in years--and they couldn’t get on without Miss Linnett.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Yes, of all the changes that have marked this changeful century, of all
the transformations, social, political and economic, that have affected
the situation of women since the establishment of the Republic, that
change is most significant and potent which has placed her so widely
and so potently in business. Miss America is in business: patiently
ambitiously, grotesquely, indispensably in business. The social changes
have not been great,--indeed, one is often startled to find how slight
they have been. Political changes, important and prophetic as they
are, have not as yet sensibly affected the life of women in general;
while the extraordinary extent of women’s entrance into business in
co-operation with and competition with men, has had an unexampled
effect upon the American girl’s domestic, social and political
situation.

  [Illustration]

The American girl is not, as yet, very definitely conscious of this
effect, although she has been told about it often and vehemently in one
way or another. Unless she is writing a paper for her club she hasn’t
time to think much about it. She enjoys business as distinguished from
plain work. The idea of a business training rather piques the fancy
of an era that has laughed away the tradition of a “sphere,” and the
sort of young lady who in a past era would have no obligations beyond
needlework, is found dabbling in shorthand and bookkeeping, as the
princes learn a trade.

  [Illustration]

And so the scientific observer is greatly distressed at times by the
thought that there must be a mighty readjustment before things can
come out smooth again. You might think that the whole thing had come
upon science unawares, that it was, in the phrase of a young woman who
was not new, all “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden.” But no sound
authority exhibits real worriment on this point. If it is man who
complains, it is man who refuses to get along without her. From this
time forth business is going to be a co-educational affair. We shall be
told many times again that somehow all this will detract from woman’s
charm, and whether we believe or mistrust so much, we shall, I suspect,
go on taking the interesting risk.

  [Illustration: The Editor’s Busy Day]

By the natural processes of time, women, young and old, will, I
suppose, like the rest of creation, continue to become better off.
Doubtless this is optimism. Pessimism says that two and two make three.
Sentimentalism says that two and two make five. It is optimism that is
content, and with good reason, to say that two and two make four.

The traveller in a scurrying railroad train becomes familiar with few
more thought-suggesting sights than the farm woman in the cottage
door. She comes forward with her hands in her apron, if not with a
baby on her arm. Sometimes she waves her hand to the unanswering
train. Sometimes she leans against the door-post and looks, one
might fancy wistfully, at the clattering cars, at the people who are
going somewhere. Sometimes the doorway is in a cabin with one room.
Sometimes the woman is slatternly, drooping; sometimes she has the
glow of content. The spectator in the car cannot but wonder what are
the emotions of the spectator in the doorway. Doubtless there is both
envy and commiseration on each side. If the spectator in the cars
sometimes pities the woman in the cabin door as one who is left out
and left behind, the spectator in the cabin door sometimes pities the
haste-hunted spectator who is being noisily flung about in the great
loom of life.

To glance backward over a century is to feel that life constantly
reiterates this situation. We all of us are roughly divided--very
roughly, sometimes--into the two groups: the people in the cars and
the people in the doorways. The look of things must go on being
affected by the point of view. There is a view-point aloof from either
situation, but it is not one which the merely human sojourner ever can
be privileged to occupy.

  [Illustration]




  [Illustration]




                                  IV

                          STITCHES AND LINKS


  [Illustration]

“Did it ever occur to you,” demanded the Professor, “how few people
actually do fashionable things?--that we probably are just as
hyperbolical in assuming that young women once amused themselves with
embroidery as that they now amuse themselves with golf?”

“Stitches and links,” I pondered, knowing that the Professor did not
expect an answer.

“What proportion of folks should you say actually do concentrate their
functions in the ‘barbaric swat’?”

I lifted my head; and she went on:

“Yes, I know that there always must be a fashionable, a dominating
pastime, and I have no disparagement of golf as golf. It is a good
enough game in its way. I am bound to admit this after having made a
very good score myself. Moreover, it is Scottish, which is a guarantee
of a latent profundity. It is a large game, and, as Sir Walter said of
eating tarts, is ‘no inelegant pleasure.’ I have been told by those
who have had an opportunity to know, that it calls out a great variety
of qualities. That may be said of many other things; but no matter.
My suggestion is that the assumption of prevalence in a so-called
fashionable thing leaves something unexplained, something that may be
very important, a philosophical hiatus--”

“Professor,” I said, “have you never stopped to think that fashionable
fads and fads that are not fashionable are potent in two ways, that
is to say, first and primarily, in participation, and second, in
contemplation? There is less golf than talk about golf. One game of
golf may be repeated any day, for example, one hundred million times in
print. As the newspapers play golf with type, so the physically present
spectators on the links are repeated many-fold in those who not less
are participants and spectators, who wear ostentatious golf stockings
without ever having seen a teeing ground. This secondary participation
and appreciation is the breath of life to social fads. Probably this
may be said of all not absolutely primary pleasures. And so society
says, ‘We are all playing golf,’ which is not true at all, but which
instantly produces a situation that amounts to the same thing. We shall
say that one woman in ten thousand who may be in a situation, so far as
opportunity is concerned, to play anything, is playing golf, but this
shall not make it possible for the other nine thousand nine hundred
and ninety-nine who are not playing golf, to play anything else and
make it fashionable at the same time. This could not be, any more than
that we could have more than one Napoleon, more than one most-talked-of
book, more than one absorbing scandal, at a time. All epidemics present
this feature of concentration. Napoleon was just as much an epidemic
as crinoline or ‘Robert Elsmere.’ The hypnotists have a word for this
which has escaped me at the moment--”

“Multo-suggestion,” contributed the Professor, patiently.

  [Illustration]

“Something to that effect, in which we have a scientific explanation of
the exclusiveness of fashion, an explanation of fashion itself. And the
thing could not be different. That susceptibility to the contagion of
enthusiasm which inspires the American with so passionate an interest
in all of his hobbies, is a susceptibility which explains his keener
interest in life, his democracy of sentiment, his ardent yet generally
cautious and sane pursuit of entertainment.”

“Much of this,” interposed the Professor, in her ruthless way, “might,
it seems to me, be said with equal propriety of any civilized people.”

“I think, Professor, that there are some significant points of
difference--points of difference associated very largely, I think, with
the American sense of humor, which we are in the habit of complacently
arrogating. I think, Professor, that your philosophical hiatus is
occupied very largely by a sense of humor.”

“That,” laughed the Professor, “reminds me of that story of the boy
who was seeking to explain to his companion the characteristics of
spaghetti. ‘You know maccaroni?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you know the hole through
it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, spaghetti’s the hole.’ I do wish I could believe
more completely in your sense of humor theory. In the first place it
is hard to explain some of the things the young people do by their
possession of a sense of humor.”

  [Illustration]

“On the contrary, Professor, I think American young folks develop a
sense of humor earlier than any other in the world, which is a Yankee
enough thing to say. This may be an odd contention from me, but to me
one of the most distinctive traits of the American girl is her gift for
being unserious. It is not always a sense of humor, either; if it is,
it is a sense entirely her own, for it certainly is not associated
with traits which we ascribe to a sense of humor in men. In any case
it is a saving sense, a sense that keeps her from taking things so
tragically as the unknowing or unsympathetic spectator might expect.
The American has a genius for radicalism, a creative defiance of logic
and tradition. Once in a while some philosopher discovers that the
frivolities of life have an immense importance. Scientifically the
physical distortions of a laugh are ridiculous. Yet we almost have
ceased to defend it, even in young ladies.”

“A ready laugh,” the Professor said, “is no indication of a sense of
humor. The comic and the humorous are sometimes even antagonistic. You
have heard me defend irreverence in girls, but a want of seriousness
often indicates a want of humor, for a sense of humor, my friend,
is essentially a sense of proportion. Now, to my mind, the American
girl does not indicate so keen a sense of proportion in her golf, for
instance, as in her clubs.”

“Well,” I ventured, “she is serious enough in them, surely.”

“Only to those who do not understand her,” returned the Professor
severely. “That women take their clubs too seriously, too improvingly,
has been a matter of complaint for a long time. There has been almost
a missionary spirit among those who have sought to save our girls from
clubs. Some of the missionaries have preached total abstinence among
the girls. ‘If you take one club,’ they have said, ‘you will take
another. The appetite will grow on you. You pride yourself on your
power of resistance now; but after you have taken a club, a dreadful,
unappeasable craving will spring up within you, and you will want more.
You will not be able to pass a club without wanting it. Even after you
have yielded to a morning, afternoon, and evening indulgence, you will
find a temptation to take a luncheon club too,--and when you take them
with your meals they have a particularly insidious effect. From this
it is but a step to a Browning bracer at nine A. M. and a Schopenhauer
cocktail just before dinner. Take no clubs at all--especially the
subtle, supposed-to-be-innocuous reading club--’”

“Look not upon the club when it is read,” I murmured.

“‘--for these,’” the Professor continued, with her inimitable chuckle,
“‘for these lead surely to more deadly stimulants. Indeed, these are,
to those who truly know them, more deadly than many another sort.’
Then there is the more moderate school of missionaries which is for
limiting the number of clubs to so many a week, or to cutting them
down gradually on the theory that a girl who has been taking clubs
right along cannot stop short without peril to her health. By dropping,
say, one club a week for a whole season, a girl may, from a repulsive
intellectual sot be brought back, by patient nursing, and in due time,
to decency and three clubs a week.”

“But, Professor,” I said, “they must believe in clubs as a medicine, as
a stimulant in the case of a threatening mental chill--”

  [Illustration]

“Don’t be frivolous,” commanded the Professor; “my irony was incidental
to the statement that all of this talk about the seriousness of women’s
clubs is based on a misapprehension. In outward form the clubs are
serious, and the theme, their ostensible _raison d’être_, almost
justifies the misapprehension. When you see a batch of women setting
in upon civil government, or mediæval pottery, or Sanskrit, or Homer’s
hymn to the Dioscuri, or the Heftkhan of Isfendiyar, it is, perhaps,
instinctive that the uninformed should jump to the conclusion that
these women are serious, though a moment’s thought might suggest a
wiser view. If women really took these things seriously they would not
survive. The truth is that the French Revolution, and the Rig-Veda,
and the Ramayana are all very amusing if you know how to go at them.
If the physical culture classes took the exercises as seriously as the
teachers I am sure the members would all break down. And it is the
same way with the study of cathedrals or street-cleaning.”

I reminded the Professor of the lady I had heard of, who wanted to
know at the club whether the Parliamentary drill then organizing was
anything like the Delsarte movements, and of the other, who, at her
first meeting, being appointed a teller, wanted to know what she was to
tell. “I trust, Professor, that you will not take from me my simple,
unquestioning faith in the earnestness of these light-seeking ladies.”

“Those instances,” smiled the Professor, “illustrate the first phase.
You must not be misled by them, for they actually are confirmatory.
You may discern in them the attitude of mind favorable to the feminine
way of taking things lightly. A woman who asks why, never gets nervous
prostration. It is when she gets above asking why that you may watch
for shipwreck.”

“Well, Professor, all I can say is that you have left me in a state
of miserable darkness as to women’s clubs. Surely there are vast
misapprehensions somewhere.”

“There surely are,” admitted the Professor.

“But how do you explain them?”

“The women?”

“The clubs.”

“By woman’s revolt against her segregation. Not, in my opinion, that
she is protesting against the gregarious advantages of man, but because
she is beginning to discover that her sisters are worth knowing. She
has begun to be impersonally interested in, as well as interesting to,
the other woman. The woman’s desire is not improvement; it is, whether
she knows it or not, the other woman, precisely as a man’s interest
in his club is the other man. It has been said that a man often goes
to his club to be alone, and that there is this advantage in a club
that is a place, over a club that is a state of mind. But a woman goes
to a club _not_ to be alone. I suppose there are times when it
would do a woman good to get away from her family, not into company,
but into lonesome quiet. Mrs. Moody, who has said so many wise things,
declares in her ‘Unquiet Sex’ that college girls are too little alone
for the health of their nerves. This may be so, yet women’s clubs are
contemporaneous with girls’ colleges. It begins to look as if it was at
college that the American girl learned that it is not good for woman to
be alone--even with her family. At any rate, that independence which
is so characteristic of the American girl, which is, as I have been
informed and believe, somewhat disconcerting to men, is, undoubtedly,
largely the result of the American girl’s improved relations with her
sister women. When she is as successfully gregarious with regard to
women as men are with regard to men, her sex maturity will be complete.
I know that you are wondering what sort of a woman she is going to be
in that matured state. Have no anxiety. She will not be less agreeable,
but more so. She will overdo the clubs, but she will recover from
that; she will shed them the moment they cease to serve her purpose.
I am going to a club now. I am going to talk to it about Savonarola.
The club will be very well dressed, and so shall I, if I know myself,
and we neither of us shall let smoke from the fateful fires of the
fifteenth century blind us to the fact that we are living in the
nineteenth.”

  [Illustration]

“All of which,” I said, in a severe tone, “is illustrative of the fact
that woman is a sophist--though perhaps I should say an artist, for she
uses life as so much material with which to construct an effect.”

“Life _is_ an art,” remarked the Professor at the mirror.

“And you, Professor--”

  [Illustration]

But she was gone. I understood well enough that the Professor had just
given an exhibition of her dexterity in taking the other side, taking
it in a feminine rather than in a pugnacious spirit. The Professor’s
negatives always remind me of how affirmative the American girl is.
There is an English painting called “Summer,” in which the artist (Mr.
Stephens) gracefully symbolizes the drowsy indolence of June. This
classic allegory may not have the English girl specifically in mind,
but I am quite certain that we should not be satisfied with an American
symbol for the same idea which did not in some way indicate that Miss
America, even in summer, is likely to be representing some enthusiasm,
Pickwickian or not as you may choose to make it out. The spirit of
fantasy, sitting in the midst of our variegated life, who should call
up the American Summer Girl, must summon a different company. The
spirit of fantasy would know that the American summer girl, though
she can be a sophist, and agree that this or that is the fashion
this summer, is nevertheless not to be painted as a reiteration. It
frequently was remarked of the Americans at Santiago that they had
great individual force as fighters. There always will be critics to
remark upon the hazard of this trait in war. At all events it was and
is an American trait. And in conducting her summer campaign against an
elusive if not altogether a smokeless enemy, Miss America is displaying
the same trait. She can accept a social sophistry, but you must leave
her individuality. She will not have tennis wholly put aside if she
does not choose. She will not give up her horse because a little steed
of steel has entered the lists, nor give up her bicycle because it has
become profanely popular. She may choose to arm herself solely with a
parasol, to detach herself from even the suggestion of a hobby, which,
to one who has the individual skill, is a notoriously potent way in
which to establish one of those absolute despotisms so familiar and so
fatal in society. There is the girl with a butterfly net, the girl who
goes a-fishing, the girl who swims, the girl who wears bathing suits,
the girl who gives a sparkle to the Chautauqua meetings in the summer,
the girl who gets up camping parties, the girl who gets up the dances,
the girl who plots theatricals, the girl with the camera, the girl who
can shoot like a cowboy,--where should we end that remarkable list? How
impossible to express the summer girl in any single type?

  [Illustration]

Indeed, the American girl’s methods of amusing herself are so various
as to make it increasingly difficult to typify her at all, except as
a goddess who, like Minerva (though _she_ did not go in much
for amusing herself), shall illustrate a wide range of activities
serenely and successfully undertaken. There is a triteness in the
accomplishments of any period, yet the spirit of individualism in the
American girl introduces here, as elsewhere, a diversifying element.
I was reading the other day that Miss Mitford had that “faculty for
reciting verses which is among the most graceful of accomplishments.”
Where have all the verse reciters gone? Why did this elegant
accomplishment perish? Are we all less poetical? Are our girls losing
that sense of sentiment to which we used to look for so many of their
quieter charms? Has this change anything to do with another change,
surely not to be lightly accepted, which has of late years taken poetry
from the top of the page, where we once thought it belonged of natural
right, and placed it at the bottom? Is it finally to be crowded off
the page altogether? Has the fact that women no longer consider verse
an accomplishment anything to do with this subtle but revolutionary
change? And what shall poetry say? Will poetry go on as it has from the
beginning of time arming us with epithets of praise?

    If she be not so to me,
    What care I how fair she be?

I must ask the Professor some day what she thinks of the disappearance
of poetry--she would tell me to say verse--as an accomplishment.
For of course we cannot afford to ignore the significance of
accomplishments, their influence either upon those who display or
upon those who observe them. Accomplishments are more than an armor,
a decoration,--they are a vent. A boy has his fling; a girl must have
her accomplishments. It is long since hobbies were fitted with a
side-saddle, and we have had no occasion to resent the general results.
The concrete effect upon individual men is sometimes disquieting,
but that is another matter. Miss America is, after all, especially
accomplished in what she knows. The product of a system by which the
limits of her information are the limits of her curiosity,--for, in
general, she is not prohibited from reading the newspapers,--she has
acquired a faculty which may, for aught I know, have superseded her
quotation of verse,--the faculty for quoting facts. Yes, she still
quotes, and the newer accomplishment, if less elegant, is not one
which we may scorn or overlook. If in Tennyson’s phrase, she is part
of all that she has seen, we might add “in print,” as a supplemental
explanation of her attitude of mind.

Perhaps if the author of “Les Misérables” saw her at certain times he
might use the qualified praise he applied to the Parisians when he
called them “frivolous but intelligent.” Yet if St. Jerome had seen
her on the beach I hardly think he could have had the heart to say, “I
entirely forbid a young lady to bathe.” Her whole effect is qualifying.
She carries into all her enthusiasms a modifying reservation. The
trait is typified and illustrated for us when we see her coming home
from the reading club on a wheel, or carrying her novel to breakfast.
The social hysteric always is sure that something dreadful is going
to happen, and then, in one of those sensational hairbreadth escapes
in which nature delights, the thing does not happen. The hysteric has
overlooked the reservation by which the fad escapes monomania, by which
the enthusiasm is subordinated to its owner.

  [Illustration]

Intermittently her enthusiasms bring up the venerable charge of
mannishness. A hundred years ago the editor of the London “Times”
complained savagely that women were becoming wickedly masculine. “Their
hunting, shooting, driving, cricketing, fencing, faroing and skating,”
he cried, “present a monstrous chaos of absurdity not only making day
and night hideous but the sex itself equivocal. Lady-men or men-ladies,
‘you’ll say it’s Persian, but let it be changed.’” Ptahhotpou the
ancient Egyptian has something to the same effect, but I have forgotten
his phrase.

  [Illustration]




  [Illustration]




                                   V

                     “WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOCIETY”


  [Illustration]

One day it happened with me, as with many another impatient traveler,
that I had to spend two hours between trains in a certain obscure town.
Perhaps I should say, in a certain obscure railway station, for the
town was singularly vague, uninviting and irresponsive, not at all the
sort of place that one would expect to know what to do with. It was,
indeed, the fragment of a town, as if, in the sprinkling of villages
along the railway, the material at this point ran short, leaving barely
a sufficient supply of elemental features. And being confronted by the
unprofitableness of the prospect,--by the drowsy, straggling street,
running (the word sounds ironical) from the station, the unfriendly
stare of the town hall, plastered over with play bills; the sunburned
whiteness of the little church; the obvious taciturnity of the man
smoking in front of the general merchandise store,--I bought the local
paper, for there was a local paper, with a “patent outside,” that
occurred every Friday morning. And the first thing that struck my eye
in the local paper was a conspicuous headline: “What is Going on in
Society.”

I had seen the thing before in other papers, in Chicago, in Boston, in
Washington, in Atlanta, and in the provincial habit that falls to a man
who thinks of life from the view-point of a big city, I had associated
the line with something very different from any conditions that seemed
likely to be present here. I looked out of the station window at
the little white church, at the chromatic town hall, at the general
merchandise store, at a neat girl with a tan cape who was coming down
the main street,--and turned with curiosity to the society column.

It was just the same as any other. It had all the adjectives of New
York, or Richmond, or St. Louis, and if Voltaire had been reading it
he might have hesitated to say that the adjective is the enemy of
the noun. Evidently, too, the same things were going on that were
going on elsewhere in society. It appeared especially that Miss Effie
So-and-So had just “come out,” and that the event was signalized on
Monday evening by a dance which was described at length as to the
spacious drawing-rooms, the floral devices, the orchestra behind the
fringe of palms, the cotillion, the favors, the elegant gown of Miss
So-and-So’s mother, the gowns and ornaments of the other feminine
guests, in detail, with a cordial closing word for the refreshments,
which had been served at eleven o’clock. On Tuesday night there had
been a birthday dance at the Sheriff’s, at which “society was largely
represented”; at a pink tea on Wednesday afternoon there had been
some novel decorations at small tables; and on Thursday evening the
young ladies of the Polaris Club had gone over to Sudley’s with Mrs.
So-and-So as chaperon. There was more as to a festival in preparation
by the ladies of the First Church, as to a euchre party for the
following Thursday, and as to a little surprise which it was whispered
that “some society men” were arranging for the close of the season.

Here, certainly, was food for thought. Could anything more piquantly
have illustrated the relativity of the term Society, more brilliantly
have demolished the pretension that Society has any geography? We have
our book definitions, by which we agree glibly to say that society
is the cultured, the fashionable, the favored class (or elsewise,
according to your dictionary) of “any community”; but how easy it is
for city pretence (and provincialism is never so arrogant as in big
cities) to see in its own set the true title to social eminence. It is
indicative of that interesting individualism which prevails in the
United States, and which perhaps we may learn to prize as one of the
precious products of democracy, that no town regards itself as small in
any sense that shall restrict or disqualify its individuals. This is
particularly true of towns in their feminine population. You may find a
community without gas, electric light, telephones or a board of trade,
but you shall not on that account decide that it is too small to have
a woman’s club and a social calendar. We are accustomed to say that it
all is a question of degree.

    When Adam delved and Eve span
    Who was then the gentleman?

  [Illustration]

We are accustomed to admit that in the senate of society even the small
states shall say their say. But scarcely can we realize without much
travel how far the fact that this country is too big for the focussing
of society in any one, two, or dozen places, affects the demeanor
and development of the social units. The fact that there are widely
prevalent formulæ, helps us first to the assumption, safe enough, that
these are applied, that there is a wish and an occasion to use them in
some way. They help us further to an estimate of the relative activity
of social forces, to the points of emphasis. But there is one thing
the wide use of formulæ never will help you to find out, and that is
the most interesting fact of all--the local flavor of the conformity.
Society is an Established Church in whose pews the dissenters form
a majority; and if I could, by some chance, have let my train go by
and have been admitted into the circle of that village society, I
certainly should have found that while it gave a sort of lip-service to
the social creeds, this society had its own way of doing so, and that
it adopted lightheartedly, like its new byword or improved flounce,
certain phrases, certain dicta of the world’s larger social groups, for
its own purposes, with its own reservations. I do not deny that I have
seen social formulæ grimly and mechanically used in certain quarters,
but the whimsical reservation is more characteristic.

  [Illustration]

The American girl is so definitely a social creature, and her social
attributes are so personal, that she never appears to be dependent upon
social machinery. She brings into society the invaluable force of her
individual availability. That our social groups seem to cohere proves
that she must possess in some degree that deference to form which
begins in the acceptance of terms. Humanity can never pair well until
it has grouped well. Grouping is the beginning of that compromise which
reaches its crisis in pairing. Even the goddess of democracy, who is
presumed to dote upon calling a spade a spade, who hates the euphemisms
of effete monarchical society, may not despise the butler’s baritone or
the futility of attempting on one occasion six hundred different forms
of adieu. Even George Eliot admitted that “a little unpremeditated
insincerity must be indulged in under the stress of social
intercourse.” The trouble with unpremeditated insincerities, however,
is that you often wish you hadn’t said them, not (unfortunately for
the symmetry of the retribution) because they were insincere, but
because they were unpremeditated and inferior. It is much safer to
be unpremeditated with sincerities than with insincerities, and, as
the literature of social satire may help us to see, there is great
hazard in any case. It is a pity, perhaps, that the great advantages
of meeting your kind in your and their best clothes, must be bought so
dearly, yet, as Thackeray has observed, “if we may not speak of the
lady who has just left the room, what is to become of conversation
and society?”

  [Illustration]

Social custom is so arbitrary that it might be, and doubtless would
be, a reckless and inconclusive thing for any one to assume that the
American girl in society is actually so radical as her reputation
in other avenues might suggest. I believe that it is quite commonly
agreed that while the French girl in society is, perforce, much more
reserved than the American, the English girl at a ball or an “evening”
exhibits a freedom from restraint not commonly seen in America. These
things, however, count for little except as showing the domination
of mere form, for there can be no doubt that in social life, using
the term broadly, the American girl has more liberty, and uses more
liberty than the English girl. If the privileges of a host’s roof are
liberally construed by the English girl, the American girl takes a
candid and undaunted view of a hotel and a public ballroom; and under
conditions which in any manner detach her from the immediate presence
of formality, she falls back upon her individual preferences, her
personally developed methods of meeting situations, with a readiness
and sureness that carry their own vindication. Because she can have
a developed individuality yet be no rebel, the American girl can
grasp and enjoy liberty without despising authority. Indeed, her very
possession of liberty must develop a certain personal conservatism
which as a mere subject of authority she might never acquire. A great
many fantastic things which at various times have been said about the
American girl might appear to have been uttered in ignorance of the
fact that there is an American mother.

I have in mind a family living in Washington city, where there is, as
everyone knows, a highly seasoned and heterogeneous society, a society
utterly different from any that is to be met with elsewhere in this
country, and one which on that account offers peculiarly excellent
opportunities for study on the part of those foreign observers who
enjoy being misled about us. If there is any place in the United States
where the American mother has opportunity for her administrative
genius, it is at the national capital. The peculiar conditions created
by political, diplomatic and administrative forces in the capital
of a republic, the prevalence of the open door, and the presence of
both domestic and foreign transients who do not always appreciate
the limitations of liberal custom, make Washington a place apart. A
single instance may serve to illustrate the firmness of the women who
actually control social destiny. Under circumstances which it is not
necessary to detail, a certain elegant attaché of one of the legations
began calling upon the young lady of the family I have named. He was a
handsome and entertaining young man, easy with women and cordial with
men, glib in the arts, himself a good singer, and speaking English with
a fascinating inflection. One evening the mother said quietly to the
daughter: “Grace, the next time the Count calls I wish that you would
ask to be excused.” The daughter looked her astonishment. She was not
greatly interested in the count, yet he was very agreeable, and she
said so. But her mother said, “Grace, you must trust me.” And when the
count came again he was made to understand.

It was a simple, unsensational incident, but because I knew the liberal
ethics of the mother and the apparently complete independence of the
daughter (she was twenty-three) the incident the more effectively
reminded me that though the American mother does not feel it incumbent
upon her to closely hover over her offspring with a solicitous wing,
she not the less observes and governs. It so happened that the gilded
count a few months later became involved in so gross a scandal that
his withdrawal from Washington became imperative. Influence in his
government saved him from worse annoyance than transfer to another
court. The mother’s instinct had been true. And who can doubt that a
liberally reared girl, when she herself assumes the office of mother,
will, without having to make sinister payment for her knowledge, be the
better equipped for a judgment of the world in the interest of those
who may be dependent upon her authority?

That the American mother cares more for real than for apparent
authority, explains, to those who know, the visible and so often
misleading detachment of the daughter; and the daughter’s sense of a
dependence that is not irksome, a suzerainty that is not intrusive,
a mother care that has no vanity of assertion, appears in her freer
bearing, her finer self-reliance. Whatever her special gifts, meeting
her socially always is likely to have the charm associated with the
fact that she never is afraid either that she will not rise to the
occasion or that she will offend authority. She has not the first fear
because she is playing her own game. She has not the second because she
does not live in a threatening or too admonitory shadow.

You think of these things sometimes when you sit opposite a fan. Her
fan! Have you not seen it blot out at the critical moment all that was
worth looking at in the world? Have you not realized that it is part
of her panoply? Have you not witnessed over and over again the genius
which she exhibits in the management of accessories? Have you not heard
in the flutter of her fan a note from that orchestra of sounds in which
she makes even her silk petticoat play a witching part?

  [Illustration]

With her fan you quite naturally associate those two absolutely
unanswerable arguments--an American girl’s eyes. They are different,
believe me, these American eyes, from any other sort. The women of no
other country can look at you that way. You must admit, and in some
degree understand this, or you cannot hope to understand Miss America
in society or anywhere else. You may say of her eyes what Darwin
hinted of eyes in general, that they are the supreme physical paradox.
They do not peer like the virgin eyes of poetical tradition. It
has been complained that they have not at all the inquiring look once
thought to be so winsome in the young. They seem to _know_, yet
they are too feminine to assert. We say hard things about the poets
nowadays, but who can blame the poets for becoming emotional over her
eyes? Are eyes ever more a mystery, a contradiction, an uncombattable
force than when Miss America turns upon us her gentle yet fearless,
her wise yet maidenly orbs? We may have planned a battle. We may have
girded ourselves for a glance toward these twin guns in that implacable
turret, but at the first encounter our bravado withers. When she uses
these weapons as she pre-eminently knows how, we declare the motion
carried--the eyes have it.

So soon as we grasp the fact that Miss America can look _and_
talk, we are in a fair way to understand some of the secrets of her
power. It is quite generally admitted that she talks well, and very
seldom, I think, with any disparaging reservation. She is a good
talker. She is more; she is a good conversationalist, for she can
listen. If speech is silver and silence is golden, I am free to admit
that Miss America does not seem to believe altogether in the gold
standard. She appears to be somewhat of a bi-metallist. I don’t blame
her; and I always admire her method of dealing with men who believe in
the free silver of continuous talk.

Her reserve here is characteristic of her agreeable poise in society
whenever and wherever she is called upon to say the right thing at the
right time. She never exhibits stage fright, though she has confessed
(afterward) to the symptoms. If, like Isabella, she is “loth to speak
so indirectly,” she doesn’t show it. She may, indeed, like the Venus
of Melos, be disarmed, but she never will be found, like the Winged
Victory, to have lost her head. Foreigners sometimes have said that
Miss America talks too loudly, but I am sure that this effect arises
from her vivacity, and one might retort that if her enunciation ever
is more than necessarily audible the chances are all in favor of your
being glad that you did not miss a word.

  [Illustration]

Sometimes she has a way of talking to you at an oblique angle. She
likes to banter while she pours tea, for example, parrying and
thrusting with the agility of one of those Viennese girls who know
how to fence with a blade in each hand. When Mme. De Staël declared
that conversation, “like talent, exists only in France,” Miss America
had not grown up. It still is true, probably, as Mrs. Poyser pointed
out, that a woman “can count a stocking top while a man’s gitting his
tongue ready.” Man’s development has been distressingly slow. He never
has met but indifferently the supreme test of the _tête-à-tête_.
It may be that his habits of life dispose him to take an exaggerated,
sometimes even a morbid, view of the hazard of words. Regarding the
situation solemnly is fatal to facility. The situation is not, and
cannot be, intrinsically solemn, being devised to get away from
solemnity. The talk is no more momentous than the tea. Neither is an
end, but only a means. “It grieves my heart,” cried Addison, “to see a
couple of proud, idle flirts sipping their tea for a whole afternoon
in a room hung round with the industry of their great-grandmothers.”
Now this comment, surely, represents a most unwholesome frame of mind,
subversive of that relaxation which Delsarte and many charming women
disciples have bidden us cultivate.

  [Illustration]

Alas! it would be a good thing if sipping tea for a whole afternoon in
one room were the worst sin practised by our young women. Sipping tea
in a dozen rooms on the same afternoon is surely a worse matter. In the
days when people gave up a whole afternoon to a call, conversational
stitching and tea drinking were reduced to a science, and gossip to a
fine art. In a later day, when the author of the Synthetic Philosophy
found occasion to marvel over and to lament the velocity with which
men and women were going about their affairs in this country, calling
customs had utterly changed. If our women had undertaken to perpetuate
throughout the year the New Year’s Day habits of the sociable Dutch of
Manhattan, they could not have been more successful. The potency of
pasteboard and the human imagination have not greatly diminished the
pressure, and will not so long as the intoxication of mere rapidity
continues to preserve its power. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
has colloquially expressed the distressing celerity with which certain
classes of fashionable women rush in, laugh, talk, eat and disappear,
in the tersely alliterative “giggle, gabble, gobble, git.”

These habits are, of course, utterly destructive of good talk. Modern
society talk under the pressure of numbers and a consent to oscillate
violently, is like the scattered fragments of a word game. A man--I
cannot speak for a woman--emerges from a “crush” with fresh emotions
toward the grotesquely ironical definition of words as the vehicle of
thought.

  [Illustration: Gossip]

However, I am glad to think that Miss America does not seek to revive
the spectacular talking such as women did in the days of the old
French salons. A woman talking to a dozen men at the same time may
have been a charming affair. Mme. Récamier is credited with having
done it very well. But no sane and truthful man ever will admit his
contentment with the microscopic fragment of a woman’s attention.
Exclusive interest in a woman is undoubtedly a primitive instinct, yet
the great deference paid to success in the _tête-à-tête_ well
may justify this instinctive preference, and those hostesses surely
will be most successful who devise some liberty for this instinct. The
tendency of our social life is doubtless against centralization. There
can be no more monologists, it seems. “The worst of hearing Carlyle,”
said Margaret Fuller, “is that you cannot interrupt him.” The modern
social gathering, whatever its aims or variations, is quite sure at
least of this quality,--that it will interrupt. We cannot deny that
even “One-Minute Conversations with Nice Girls” is an experience having
its compensations as well as its drawbacks, for while a few eloquent
seconds with many women may not be so desirable in some ways as many
eloquent seconds with one woman, it always must be difficult to know
beforehand just when this will be the case. Mr. Warner has shrewdly
pointed out that some women are interesting for five minutes, some
for ten, some for an hour; “some,” he adds, “are not exhausted in a
whole day; and some (and this shows the signal leniency of Providence)
are perennially entertaining, even in the presence of masculine
stupidity.” The trouble is (as you might guess) that the interruption
always cuts you off at the end of three minutes with the girl who
would be interesting for a whole day. For aught I know, society may
have averaged this thing, and have discovered that the low limit is
safest, that it leaves both parties most completely in possession of
the benefit of the doubt. But how few men can start a new conversation
every ninety seconds with anything like the success that attends a
woman’s efforts to do the same thing?

No, woman, who created Society with its capital letter, has succeeded,
whether by design or accident, in producing a situation in which she is
placed at a very definite advantage. She can riddle a man with deadly
small shot before he can roll up his heavy guns. Yet she never will
like the man who either refuses the close order or surrenders. She will
like him best if he “puts up a good fight.” If he stammers, she knows
just how to deal with his broken English and keep him going. _Quot
linguae, tot homines._ But you cannot multiply a woman that way.
One language is all that she needs. Small talk is a large question.
As the loose change of vocal currency, it is an indispensable
commodity. The larger denominations are not available. As for cashing
an intellectual check, good as your credit may be, it is out of the
question altogether; and a wise man recognizes the fact that in the
matter of this commodity woman is a banker who must always pocket a
margin.

  [Illustration]

One day in a far Southwestern city the belle of the place drove me in
a dogcart for a memorable half hour. She was no taller than I, but she
wore a magnificent hat, one of those hats which even the girl could not
make you forget, and as she sat on the “dinky,” she arose beside me
in a quelling contrast. The horse was a smart stepper (at least that
is my confused impression), the road demanded a discriminating rein;
but though we drove past the leading hotel in the crisis of the event,
and drew the fire of a hundred eyes, that girl’s delightful wit never
faltered nor forsook her, that is to say, never forsook _me_; for,
of course, I needed a helping hand. No man not specifically trained
to it could gracefully maintain himself at such an altitude with any
credit to his power of speech. When I recall that dashing day, the
roll of the cart, the flutter of those lofty feathers, the firm grace
of those little gloved hands, the healthy glow of the face I looked
up to, I feel an accentuated humility, a deep conviction of my oral
inferiority.

In society, as elsewhere, woman often reminds us of her superiority
to the algebraic axiom that things which are equal to the same thing
are equal to each other. There are qualified ways in which a man may
be equal to society. But to say that he is equal to a woman--that is
another matter.

You will remind me that society is not wholly a matter of talk, large
or small. This is very true. Among other things, it is a matter of
clothes.

  [Illustration]




  [Illustration]




                                  VI

                           LACE AND DESTINY


  [Illustration]

Victor Hugo thought that “a book might be written with regard to the
influence of gold lace on the destiny of nations.” Carlyle wrote the
book, extending his discussion to the influence of lace that is not
golden on the destiny of society; and one may scarcely venture a few
tentative words upon the subject of clothes without the feeling that he
should, properly, apologize to “Sartor Resartus.” And yet, as we have
many reasons for remembering, there are new clothes, and if there is no
new philosophy, it is not impossible that the old philosophy may have
some new bearings, and that the new conditions, as sometimes happens,
modify the application of the eternal verities.

Naturally one cannot throw out even a casual suggestion in such a
matter without realizing that we have gone very far from the primitive
standpoint. When Adam told Eve that she looked lovely in green, the
situation was strikingly different from any that we now can fancy,
not only with regard to the lady, but with regard to the situation
in general, for, as there could be no relativity in the sincerity
of the compliment, there could have been no diffidence in receiving
it. It is clear that either paying or receiving a compliment under
such circumstances must of necessity have had an inferior excitement;
yet we can have no difficulty in grasping the fact that between the
primitive dress reform situation presented in the wilds of Paradise,
and the highly evolved subtleties of modern dress, lie infinite ethical
complexities, a pyramid of riddles, a Mammoth Cave of doubt. It having
been established by centuries of habit that civilized men and women
shall always wear some clothes, and most of the time a great deal of
them, the question has not the simplicity which it might have had at
an earlier time. Clothes principles are now as intricate as apparel
itself. They are associated with ages of prejudice, libraries of
history, acres of painted art, mountains of dry goods. On the other
hand, certain notions now are entirely accepted, and the field for
debate, after all, is much narrower than might at first appear.

It may not be amiss to remember the fact, flatly expressed by Carlyle,
that “the first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration,
as, indeed, we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized
countries.” In women, dress is this “spiritual want” touched by
artistic sentiment, I had almost said religion; and whatever we may
say of the essential barbarism of the sentiment, it seems quite likely
to prove one of those barbarisms that are fundamental and permanent.
If we might remember that it is fundamental much of modern discussion
would be simplified. I find Mr. Finck giving the following elements as
explaining the Fashion Fetish: the vulgar display of wealth, milliners’
cunning, the tyranny of the ugly majority, cowardice and sheepishness.
These are all good explanations, but the list seems sadly deficient
without an allusion to this instinctive and ineradicable desire for
decoration. Mr. Theodore Child seems to have in mind the instinctive
and final phase of the situation when he bids us “enjoy in imagination
what the meanness of the age refuses to the desire of the eyes.”

Woman herself seems to have adopted the view of Epictetus that “we
ought not, even by the aspect of the body to scare away the multitude
from philosophy.” Socrates meant the same thing when he said to one of
his too-ragged followers, “I see thy vanity shining through the holes
in thy coat.” Clothes, then, are not merely to warm or to conceal, but
also to decorate. Wherein they warm or conceal, they are a science.
Wherein they decorate, they are an art. The science is exact; the art
is rich in variety and change, making every other art its handmaiden,
every season its holiday, every sentiment its theme. It is an art
redolent of the years, tingling with the daring of youth. Above all,
it is an art in which woman chooses to express herself in a language
free from the inhibitions placed upon other arts, in which, ignoring
when she chooses, the primary excuses and incentives, she takes an
art-for-art’s-sake justification for showing us the separate and
independent fascination, in themselves, of sublimated clothes. No
one who cannot perceive the inherent interest, if not the inherent
justification, of clothes as clothes, ever can see deeply into the
philosophy of dress, or ever can see deeply into the philosophy of
women.

  [Illustration]

  [Illustration]

The wide contrast, and one growing continually wider, in the
characteristics of masculine and feminine dress, on those occasions
when it most definitely expresses itself as dress, might suggest that
some variation in the governing philosophy of each had taken place,
perhaps at some definite time; for there was no such contrast in an
earlier day. It may be that at the time--and we may set this early
in the present century, easily within the period of our own national
history--when man began to simplify his attire, to put aside all
but the rudest decorative elements, woman definitely formulated her
justifications for perpetuating the idea of clothes for clothes’ sake.
We are bound to remember what she has had to live down. She has had to
live down Queen Elizabeth, and all the hyperbole of Continental fashion
when Continental fashion was in its most imaginative mood. Political
traditions were not the only burdens of our ambitious young republic.
Think of the gorgeous head-dresses, half as tall as the women who wore
them, and which afforded such delight to the caricaturist! Have you
ever stopped to think how few opportunities woman gives the cartoonist
nowadays, how severe a strain she places upon his ingenuity? There may
be an occasional note of excess. A recent foreign investigator found
the clothes of our women too much so, too perfect for repose. This
note of excess is the characteristic of genius. I myself have seen
American women who, to a merely masculine prejudice, seem to be wearing
too many rings. But we must make reasonable allowance for the natural
accumulations of time. It has occurred to me that I might do as we may
with a tree,--tell a woman’s age by her rings.

  [Illustration]

So that in looking about and finding the whole of human society
“hooked, and buttoned up and held together by clothes,” we cannot hope
in any successful way to investigate the matter, if we forget for a
moment that the dress of women is to be looked at as a subjective
element. Going a little way with logical analysis, and agreeing,
for example, that “if the cut betoken intellect and talent, so
does color betoken temper and heart,” we soon meet with a mountain
height of contradictions introduced by the purely personal effect of
woman herself, and we find, long before attaining any symmetry of
information, that woman has invested certain material elements
of life, as she has invested so many elements of life that are not
material, with the interest she herself has for us. A little lace, a
ribbon she has worn in her hair, a glove, a satin slipper, a fan, a
shred of trimming, have an eloquence in their revelation of her, a
fragrance in their transmission of her touch, which eludes logic and
confounds investigation. By a faculty and privilege of making things
seem reasonable that are not at all reasonable, by a witchcraft, a
sophistry of fashion, a trick of illusion, in the presence of which
we forget every rule of art, every principle of proportion, every
prejudice of habit, she can utterly bewilder us in a master stroke
of invincible instinct. She takes, deliberately and with exquisite
selective tact, certain entirely simple, inoffensive elements,--things
which in themselves you must acknowledge to be harmless and almost
rational; she takes these simple elements and she puts them together
by a method, and in a manner, of which no man, if he lived to be one
hundred and eighty-six, ever would discover the secret, and, waving her
wizard wand over the entire mess, she calls it a hat!

Nothing could be more preposterous, of course. When we study the thing
as an object separated from her, it might, even though we knew that she
had created it, excite our derision. But when we see this masterpiece
of absurdity upon her head, that which had seemed at once an offence to
nature and to art, the acme of decorative nonsense, immediately becomes
forgivable--immediately becomes right. It is not that we excuse it for
her sake. It is not that the apposition dismays our reason. We bow to
it, accept it, and end by perceiving that, whether it be taken as an
old fact of nature or a new fact of genius, it is unanswerable.

  [Illustration]

No woman could be more completely, undebatably sane than the Professor.
I know what I am talking about. And yet the Professor wears a hat. I
had occasion, one day, when she had left it for a moment on a table,
to study it analytically as a creation. It was a fearful and wonderful
thing. No man ever can forget the moment when first, with mature
deliberation, and in a consciousness of the vast significance of life,
he takes up a woman’s hat, timorously, as if it were a ten-inch shell
or Minerva’s helmet, and gazes into its fragile fastness. When I
mentally grasped, as a man may in the absence of the wearer, the many
and extraordinary elements of the Professor’s hat; when I sought to
associate its multi-colored grotesqueness with the classic simplicity
of the Professor’s profile; when I figured its heterogeneous elements
as an object of decoration for the Professor’s outward and visible
effect; when I fancied the Professor’s brain flashing and glowing under
this riotous symbolism, I was filled with a new sense of the futility
of reason, a new awe for the wonder of woman.

  [Illustration]

Dr. Holmes has spoken of the hat as “the vulnerable point of the
artificial integument”; but plainly he was speaking of the masculine
hat, for woman’s hat is no vulnerable point with her. It is her strong
point, her point of vantage, the citadel of her sophistries. You can
reason with her about other things, but you cannot reason with her
about her hats; not, mind you, because she will not listen, but because
she, or the hat, makes you not want to. This is not to say that it
makes no difference who wears the hat. It does make a difference. Take
a device like the calash, such as our great-grandmothers wore. There
were faces that did not look well in it, faces which quite naturally
might have made us think less well of the calash for the moment. Under
certain other circumstances--that is to say, over a certain other head,
its quaintness begins to have a meaning, and it seems as natural and
acceptable as anything else which the right face and the right person
choose to display for us. Thackeray contended that sauer-kraut tastes
good in Germany, and it is notorious that the bagpipes sound quite
reasonable in Scotland. In the same way, there is no form of hat yet
devised by human ingenuity that will not tempt forgiveness when it is
on the right woman.

And woman herself quite clearly perceives the force of association,
the importance, if the significance of the hat is to be preserved
and understood, of keeping it on her head. If this were not so why
should we be confronted with the monumental paradox that our womankind
are keeping their hats on in church and taking them off in places of
amusement? At the theatre woman consents to be separated from her hat,
and to have her hat separated from her. At her devotions she is not
yet willing to commit this discord, and in the dim religious light it
twinkles and shimmers its owner’s insistent dictum: The hat is the
woman. In a thousand ways the hat declares the existence of occult
meanings. A woman who would cut a man who wore a made tie, who would
not buy a reproduced antique or pirated print, who knows Sèvres at
a hundred yards and a real Bokhara in the dark, will cover her head
with linen lilies and cotton-bloated roses. A woman who would hesitate
to put a jewel in her hair, will heap upon the dyed straw of her hat
festoons of glass and steel and wax, with the fretted carcass of a bird.

After all, there is no occasion to take hats seriously, unless you
happen to sit behind one, which, of course, cannot always be happening.
They are a wonderful study; there are so many different kinds; they
have been talked about so much, and have filled so large a place in
our lives, especially in public audiences. They have been discussed as
widely and as fervidly as the Federal Constitution. Because of them,
men have passed laws and sleepless nights. Because of them men fought
duels in the last century and lawsuits in this. To make it possible
to have them more refulgent and fetching, husbands and fathers have
worked on Sundays and stopped smoking. Though it has been assailed
with fanatical bitterness, buffeted by satire, stripped by statute,
stoned by envy, disciplined by reform, the hat serenely survives, a
defiant catalogue of every trait for which it ever has been either
praised or condemned. From out the din of conflict and discussion it
rises unscathed and unashamed the proud emblem of woman’s pictorial
supremacy, which all nature has said must and shall be preserved.

And you know what she can do with a veil; she can make you forget that
a veil is barbarous; she can make you forget that you shouldn’t like
veils,--she can make you like her in one. She can make it increase her
effect of preciousness, if that effect is in her line; or make it
increase her sphinx-like effect, if that happens to be in her line.
She no longer is extravagant in contriving them. Sarah’s was to cost a
thousand pieces of silver. She now is content to make it a direct and
specific instrument of illusion.

  [Illustration]

If the late Mr. Darwin had given serious attention to veils he would
have remarked that the wearing of them has developed new expressions
of countenance among women. When they wrinkle,--I mean the veils,--the
wearer has a way of pursing her lips to push the silken gauze free from
the end of her nose, having accomplished which, her fingers gently
pull the thing into subjection from the lower hem. At certain seasons
and under certain conditions the habit is strangely general, until
you might think that woman, like the novelist in his last chapter, is
always drawing a veil. The more expert can pull out the wrinkles by
supplementing the pout of the lips with an indescribable wrinkling
of the nose, and without calling assistance from the hand. I do not
suppose that girls are educated to do this in any particular way, yet
the uniformity of the habit is little less than astonishing.

Speaking of uniformity of habit, I have observed the same thing about
her back hair. The gesture of the fingers with which a woman readjusts
a hairpin, or, perhaps, simply ascertains that it is doing its duty, is
wonderfully similar among all women. Yet the gesture may to a singular
degree be a reflection of her personal style, and in that latitude for
purely personal grace you sometimes are brought to the compensatory
fact that in sitting behind the hat you also are sitting behind the
hairpins.

  [Illustration]

This crowning glory of her hair! How it has fluttered in song and
story! How it has shimmered here in comedy and there in tragedy!
How it has dowered and decked and framed her, and puzzled us by its
mysterious fickleness of color, now this shade, now that, on the same
saucy, shapely head! How quaint a picture she can make for us when
she masks it in powder and carries us back to the days of Copley or
Watteau! How it has served to remind us, in some forbidden discovery
of the crimping pin or the curl-paper, that from the beginning woman’s
pleasures and her conquests have not been unmixed with pain!

  [Illustration]

How much fashion owes to hair and hair to fashion! How inexhaustible
are the harmonies of line of which it is capable! How fascinating, by
association, are the combs, and patillas and wimples and ferronières
which have caressed and curbed it! We no longer dye it blue as the
Greeks did, though we still, as the Greeks did also, produce blondes
at pleasure. Far be it from this page to express any preference as
between blonde and brunette. If, as we have been told, all of the poets
from Homer to Apuleius doted on blonde hair; if Aphrodite was blonde,
and Milton’s Eve; if Petrarch loved his blonde Laura (with crimps)
and Boccaccio delighted in tresses of gold, who shall attach any more
final significance to this than to the fact that woman at his moment is
whimsically dressing her hair like Botticelli’s Grace?

Reason does not meet these matters. “I am highly pleased,” wrote
Addison, “with the coiffure now in fashion.” That is the ideal attitude
of mind, a point of view above reproach. No man really is normal who
does not think that “the coiffure now in fashion,” yes, and all else in
fashion that expresses the invincible instinct of woman, is peculiarly
and especially likable.

“Professor!” I cried, in a moment of fresh and profound conviction,
“I am assured that it is a measure of sanity in a man that he shall
like woman in whatever she wears. She can confound our most precious
theories by doing as she pleases in the matter of dress, for the effect
is always right because she has produced it. It all is _her_. You
might as well find fault with the shade of crimson in the feathers on
the bosom of a robin as to find fault with the color of her hat or
gloves. Some combinations make us wince when we first see them, and in
the weakness of that moment we even may entertain a doubt as to the
safety of the proprieties; but we come to excuse the doubted effects,
and end by putting them into the very grammar of color. I have detected
a score of instances in which woman, or fashion speaking for her,
has met and turned the judgment of art. I have a theory that certain
painter prejudices have simply been demolished by the instinct of
woman.”

The Professor was reading an exciting book on “The Evolution of the
Vertebrata,” and I knew it, but she was quite patient, and said
quietly, “Those are not the only prejudices that have been demolished
by the instinct of woman.”

“True,” I admitted, curious, yet not disposed to challenge enumeration.
“Do you know,” I went on, “that your comment brings up an interesting
question as to the effect upon woman herself of a pampered instinct.
Will not the reckless gratification of instinct, charming as its
effects may be, tend in time to differentiate her unfavorably? Though
you meet vertebrata with your reason, when you turn your instincts
loose upon millinery are you not vitiating--”

“_Will_ you stop!” expostulated the Professor, “before both
instinct and reason co-operate in boxing your ears? Prattle about a
woman’s instinct is a man’s way of dodging admission of woman’s subtler
sense. If I actually had the time I should like to impress upon you the
fact that dress is a department of the fine arts; that it has a logic
and a language, principles, rules, functions, and a future. But that
is another matter. Man is hampered by absurd prejudices as to clothes,
especially as to the clothes of women. Our Concord philosopher remarked
that the consciousness of being well dressed imparts a peace and
confidence which even religion scarcely can bestow. Beneath the fact of
this dependence lie emotions and impulses to which women yield frankly,
but to which men turn a hypocritical squint. The candor of woman toward
her clothes instincts does her good. A free, natural love of clothes as
clothes is a sign of health in a woman.”

  [Illustration]

“Professor, if I did not know how fearfully and wonderfully it was
made, and how unpromising for the purpose, I should say that you were
talking through your hat.”

The Professor rewarded me with her choicest twinkle. “Well,” she said,
“I sha’n’t be able to laugh in my sleeve much longer; fashion is making
it tighter every day!”

“Can you not see,” I went on, “that the tightness or looseness of a
sleeve, for example, must have some direct effect upon the mental
attitude of a woman? Are not these constant changes destructive of
intellectual repose and progress? If dress is a language, how can you
escape a resulting confusion in this instability?”

“My dear sir, that constant change of which you speak is not an
instability, but a consistent and symmetrical ebb and flow.”

“It may be pure curiosity, Professor, but even if Rosalind did not have
‘a doublet and hose in her disposition,’ it seems to me that we well
may wonder how far the current bloomer affects the mind of the current
young woman. It cannot be possible that so momentous and revolutionary
a condition as the bloomer shall be without effect upon the mind of
woman--and not merely upon the women who wear them, but upon the whole
sex. It has been said that not only the physical structure but the
character of men have been modified by the fact that men persistently
avoid bagging their trousers at the knees. Will not the divided skirt
divide woman’s attention--”

“As for bloomers,” said the Professor, “and all related forms of dual
garmentature, I am going to lecture about them before the Zenith
Club, and, if you are very good, when my paper is quite completed I
shall read it to you. Meanwhile, I may remark that the bloomer is not
‘current’ at all, save, perhaps, in a modified and semi-visible way in
partnership with an abbreviated skirt,--but this is anticipating.”

  [Illustration]




  [Illustration]




                                  VII

                           CHANCE AND CHOICE


  [Illustration]

A distinguished general and admirable gentleman once was said to have
lost the Presidency because he called the tariff a “local issue.” It
might be difficult for us to discipline Coleridge for calling love
a “local anguish.” Yet the plausibility of the statement should not
defend the culprit. Love is, actually, not at all local, particularly
when it is an anguish. It is immensely pervasive, an international
issue, an inter-planetary, a universal issue. The light of love may
be hidden under the bushel of modesty, yet its undaunted X-rays will
penetrate the farthermost spaces.

But it is too late, or too early, in other words wholly unfashionable,
to write about love, and I certainly should not have committed the
offence of the foregoing paragraph had it not been for an entirely
orderly and even timely thought as to the possibility that love, like
any other malady or manifestation, might have a purely national flavor,
not merely in its outward symptoms, but in its inherent quality. That
is to say, I had wondered in what way, if in any way, the American
girl’s definition of love would be distinctive. If I had asked the
Professor, she would, had she consented to take me seriously, have
described love as “the sum and sublimation of all possible inter-human
attachments,” or something of that sort. She would have been abstract,
for woman, however personal she may incline to be by virtue of her sex
and method, loves the abstract in definition for so much of reservation
as it may leave to her. There is safety and breathing room in a large
definition. Doubtless we never shall be able to get at Miss America’s
sentiments except in a purely empirical way, and if I were writing
a treatise instead of setting down a few notes, I should have felt
an obligation to study out the question by observing critically the
conduct of the American girl in the processes of courtship.

The difficulty of such observation always must lie in the fact that
the most interested man in any specific instance himself is wholly
incapable of making report if he would. A man who could be analytical
in any circumstances which included a settlement of his own fate, would
be fit for every treason. He might go through a variety of mental
motions which to him, at the time, passed for the convolutions of pure
reason. He might, and doubtless often has, fancied himself as studying
her, as penetrating the mask of her femininity, as dispassionately
dissecting her sentiments. Indeed, every prudent man must at some
stage weigh, with whatever sobriety may be possible to him, the chances
of what she will say; and this must always include some estimate of
what she is thinking.

The relationship between what she is thinking and what she will say
is one of the most complex in nature, and I fancy that in our climate
and environment its fundamental complexity has been increased. I know
that it is the habit of science to assume that the reason woman seems
more contradictory than man is not that she is dishonest, but that she
is impulsive. Impulse naturally is far less uniform than reason. “They
change their opinions,” complains Heine, “as often as they change their
dress,” a sentiment which proves conclusively that Heine had credulous
intervals. A woman who always had the same opinion would instinctively
realize the stupidity of that condition, as she would the condition
of always being seen in the same dress; and if she didn’t have a new
opinion she might do with the old opinion as with the old dress, turn
or cut it over. You cannot say from the notorious inaccuracy of a
woman’s gesture when she presumes to place her hand on her heart, that
she has not a heart, that she is unaware of its precise location, or
that it is not in the right place.

If a man means less than he says, and a woman always means more, we may
see at a glance that it is easier to subtract than to add. But this is
not the chief difficulty. A man, if I may be pardoned the dogmatism,
always speaks in the original, while woman must be translated, and
it is vastly easier in any case, to translate his hyperbole than
her meiosis. When woman was simpler, she had less of this quality.
When she said no, and simply meant yes, man learned to translate and
understand her. Even a man could work out by the least subtle of
reasoning that when she said “No!” most fiercely she really was saying,
“_Idiot!_ why don’t you _make_ me say yes!” But after a time,
perhaps because she suspected, for good reason, man’s discovery of the
cypher, because she saw that it was not enough to turn the alphabet
upside down, woman began to qualify rather than to invert, and man
was no longer in possession of the key. The whole arithmetic of the
calculation was infinitely lifted, and rose from the rule of three into
the higher realms of pure mathematics. If she _always_ called him
back he would know just what to do. If a little absence _always_
made her heart grow fonder, the process was capable of exact and
circumstantial procedure. But no longer is it so. She may, indeed,
still mean yes when she says no. She reserves her constitutional
rights. But to read her language now, to filch from her swift talk the
true meaning, to trace in the deceptively deep stream of her feminine
philosophy the faintly shining pebbles of pure fact, is a function
calling out the highest that is in man.

  [Illustration]

In Miss America, then, we have this quality at its best, or its worst,
as you may view the matter; and the quality in her is coupled with
others that belong to her, and perhaps to her only. The degree of
independence which she has achieved has had a natural effect upon her
relations to courtship. This independence has not merely accentuated
the elusiveness which belongs to her as a woman. The quality of being
hard to get is not new in woman, or in any degree original in any
race. Ranging from the conditions in which barbaric woman is knocked
down by the strongest bidder, to those in which she is knocked down
to the highest, there is a uniform, because instinctive, outward
habit of indifference or aloofness in the sex. But Miss America’s
independence affects the whole question of her choice and the method
of her choice. And, committed as she is, by virtue of being a woman,
to a vast and fateful chance, she has, more certainly than any other
woman in the world, a choice. For good or ill, and in whatever degree
social station and social habit may modify the practice, she has an
actual participation in the forming of the matrimonial partnership. The
world has seen marriage by capture, by service, by purchase, by social
convenience, by free and natural choice. The experiment of marriage by
free choice has received in our own country its fullest trial. Marriage
by social convenience and by purchase still survive, even with us, and
there are many among us who think that marriage for love may not be
final as a national trait, and that we will discover that the compact
of marriage, being in the interest of society and actually under the
government of society should be made directly in conformity with the
convenience of society. Meanwhile, the trait is under scrutiny, the
practice is under trial.

  [Illustration]

Marriage for love, is marriage in which woman is the arbiter, so
that Miss America is carrying out, side by side with her brother’s
experiment in democracy, an extraordinary and unprecedented experiment
in social practice. She believes, and reasonably, that Plato prophesied
this system in his conservatively worded remark that “people must be
acquainted with those into whose families and with whom they marry
and are given in marriage.” She believes that if marriage is to be
“chiefly by accident and the grace of nature,” it shall be left to her
to illustrate the grace of nature. And most men who are candid with
themselves know that while man may have the nominal initiative, she is
in charge of the situation. There is a German saying that a man cannot
be too careful in choosing his parents. It is equally true that a man
cannot be too careful in letting the right woman pick him out.

  [Illustration]

If I have been able to grasp it, the American girl’s idea is that
marriage is best when it is a culminated friendship, that is to
say, when it includes friendship. This is a new idea, of course,
revolutionary in more than may at first appear. Indeed, we might more
correctly call the American idea, marriage for friendship. Balzac
has said a very severe thing of love that does not include “an
indissoluble friendship”; but it cannot be denied that we often are
perplexed to see that in this business the greater does not always
seem to be including the less. If the American girl shall succeed in
definitely incorporating friendship into the essentials of marriage
she will have accomplished a great triumph. “As to the value of other
things,” says Cicero, “most men differ; concerning friendship all have
the same opinion.”

If she shall succeed in making friendship an essential of marriage,
Miss America will, indisputably, have founded the American practice of
a pre-matrimonial acquaintance. We shall go on believing that when we
meet her with a “Fate-can-not-harm-me-I-am-engaged” look, she cannot,
as often happens in other civilizations, be in ignorance of his name.
And we can see at a glance that by insisting that she shall _know_
the man she is to marry, Miss America is assuming an intimate and
personal dominion over courtship. She not only is assuming a power and
a responsibility, but confessing the delicate truth of her individual
jurisdiction. It will make no difference what formula she uses for “You
may speak to father.” The euphemisms behind which she now can hide
herself are as diaphanous as her finest veil.

Yet, is there any to doubt her mastery of the situation she has
invented? Is there any to doubt that in her new situation she has
a new power? I know what has been said of the women who have gone
before. “And this I set down as an absolute truth,” said Thackeray,
“that a woman with fair opportunities and without an absolute hump may
marry _whom she likes_.” And I do not mean, and perhaps should
specifically protest that I do not mean, that Miss America is a whit
more assertive in her selection than the women of whom Thackeray has
chosen to say this much. But there is a sense in which Miss America, by
virtue not only of peculiar privileges, but of peculiar endowments, is
giving a new significance to courtship. Her attitude of mind is not to
be confused with mere independence. We have many antecedent examples
of independence. “At all events,” wrote Mrs. Carlyle to her insistent
suitor, “I will marry no one else. That is all the promise I can and
will make.” She thought that an agreement to marry a certain person at
a certain time was simply absurd. Miss America’s independence is the
product of conditions which have produced a sex attitude of mind as
well as an individual attitude of mind.

It has seemed as if the development of this sentiment, and the
realization of responsibility, were making the American girl more
conservative in certain ways, and that she was, in the matter of
early marriages for example, drawing nearer to the older systems.
Sentimentally, early marriages are a good thing. Perhaps they are
practically also. Martin Luther and other wise commentators have
pointedly advised them. But the century has scarcely offered approval.
Stubbs, in his “Anatomy of Abuses,” complained bitterly that it
should be possible for “every sawcy boy of xiiij., xvi., or xx yeres
of age to catch a woman and marie her without any fear of God at all.”
Early marriages were a source of great complaint in our colonial days.
Probably the caution of our young women is responsible for the fact,
now frequently quoted, that early marriages are less frequent. At the
first sign of a new caution there is always the alarmist who jumps to
the conclusion that he is to be put off until the time De Quincey set
for the amusement of taking home a printing press,--“the twilight of
his dotage”; and it will be said of this or that section when some one
is in the mood to say it, as Heine said of France in 1837, that “girls
do not fall in love in this country.”

  [Illustration]

Some characteristics of the era may not be attributed to anything that
is new in our system. Flirtation, for example, is a very old vice.
Yet, as every calling has a conscience of its own, I like to think
that flirtation has been harshly painted in some respects. If it does
not show specific modifications in our longitudes, we must conclude
that it is a necessary evil. At any rate we know from more than one
biologist that flirting is not solely a human trait. This in a measure
disperses and softens the responsibility. And one must not be hasty in
marking flirtation. There is the seeming and the real, like true and
false croup. Many women have been accused of flirting who were never
more serious in their lives, just as we have known them to be cruelly
accused of sincerity at a time when their whimsicality should have been
patent to the least intelligent of observers.

In an era when letter-writing is said to be dying out, it is not
surprising that love-letters should come under suspicion. Indeed,
there have been many temptations to cynicism. The law courts have been
invoked to decide whether love-letters belong to the sender or to the
receiver; nice questions have grown out of misunderstandings as to
proposals of marriage. It is hinted that men are to become revoltingly
crafty as to things put upon paper, and that the young lady of a not
remote future will receive her lover’s notes moist and blurred from the
embrace of a copying book.

The general decrease in the quantity of letter-writing due, among
other reasons, to the telephone, the trolley and railroads, and the
increased rapidity of life in general, undoubtedly has influenced the
mere bulk of sentimental correspondence, though concrete instances are
conflicting. One young man of my acquaintance writes to his sweetheart
every day. Another, who has been engaged for some months, confessed to
writing to the young woman (she lives in another city) once a week;
“and do you know,” he said, “I have a deuce of a time to find anything
to say!”

Whatever tendency the American girl herself may be willing to foster
or accept, it always will be true that the gift for writing the
right letter to the right person is one of the most potent known to
civilization. There are genuine, warm-hearted charming-mannered men who
can write only a brutally dull letter, and there are reprobates who
can fill a letter with the aroma of paradise. In an affair beginning
with letters the reprobate must have the advantage. Indeed, I knew a
girl who went on believing in the author of certain letters after the
most disenchanting honeymoon that ever woman endured, after society had
looked askance at her, after the towering lie of those letters had cast
a blighting shadow across her life.

  [Illustration: Thoughts]

One pretty and pleasant little woman in Kentucky told me that when she
was engaged she sometimes got two letters a day. “And when we were
married I missed those letters so!” And this was indubitably a happy
marriage. I knew in just what sort of place those letters would be
kept, and just how they would be tied up, and could fancy just how she
would look in the dim of a rainy day when she brought them forth and
spread them out--by the cradle.

  [Illustration: Thoughts]

Who can tell what passes in the heart of a woman? Who can read her as
she reads her letters over there in the corner of the summer hotel
verandah? Who can say what she is thinking there in the shadow of the
birch-tree picking off the petals? “He loves me--he loves me not”--no,
surely something more modern. What could be more piquing than that
partnership--nature and a woman? If she chooses to take another member
into the firm, that is her affair. If she has a tryst, who shall have
the meanness to wish any more or less than that he may not keep her
waiting an unseemly time--or that she may not have followed a habit she
has, and have gone absently to the wrong place? Yet she may have chosen
to walk alone and to let the summer pass and the hectic colors of the
dying season flaunt themselves in her face without giving a sign. Who
can say what passes in the mind of a woman? When she opens the book of
her own heart, and turns to the last page first to see how the thing
comes out, is she not puzzled sometimes to find all the print running
backward? Who can say, if a fairy came out of the wood, what manner of
choice she would ask of that fairy, what fortune she would consider
sweetest, what form of man she would ask for her Prince Charming? How
small the chance that she knows what she wants, or that if she did
know she would regard it as safe and symmetrical not to ask for the
opposite?

In the old romances the dead leaves crackled, and the cavalier of her
dreams whispered the soft right word in her ear, and she murmured
“Yes!” spelling it with two letters and a capital N as in the present
hour. Would the gallant of the past be to her liking to-day? Would she
receive him civilly, or would she tease and taunt him in her provoking
modern way, abusing the qualities she liked in him, sending him away
because she didn’t want him to go, telling him that he should never win
her because she had begun to fear that he would?

  [Illustration]

  [Illustration]

Neither the brusqueness nor the diffidence of the Puritan lover would
be likely to please her. The Puritan lover would lack a great many
of the qualities she now admires in men, chief among these, mayhap,
the quality of not being too solemn. She is far from Puritan severity
herself, and she would, I fear, see him go with a sigh of relief. In
the quality of not being too solemn, she might find the beau of Louis
XVI.’s time more to her liking, though his eagerness to draw his sword
for her would certainly make her laugh. She never would appreciate the
romance of his dainty duels.

His pretty speeches would amuse her for a little while, but the man
who flatters her nowadays must be a more expert artist to escape the
mortal wound of her ridicule. In a later day compliment undoubtedly
became more of an art, and the dude of the Directoire, whom you might
have found in the quaint drawing-rooms of old Boston, or Philadelphia,
or Georgetown, as well as upon his native soil, was an ingratiating
gallant in many ways. He posed, because Napoleon was making it the
fashion to pose, but he posed well, and he studied the best methods
of saying caressing things without making them nauseatingly sweet.
This art of compliment, of not saying the right thing to the wrong
woman, nor the wrong thing to any woman, reached an interesting
point of development in the contemporaries of Beau Brummel. Possibly
Miss America would have liked a Beau Brummel in an artistic spirit,
and Brummel had, as a spectacle, many traits of gracefulness and
fascination. Her elusiveness would have piqued him and his not too
grovelling deference would have made her think him an entertaining
fellow. His dress was elegant without effeminacy, his hat was the most
extraordinary yet devised by the ingenuity of man--which itself should
be a bond of sympathy. But hats pass away, and beaux melt among the
hazy images in the tapestry of time.

  [Illustration]

Yet they are always with us. Every age has blamed its beaux for wanting
the true gallantry of beaux in the past. We all have heard Miss America
say, rather petulantly, that the days of chivalry are gone. Perhaps
they are; perhaps our men give too little attention to the graces of
life. But let us hope that the modern man is not always as satire
paints him, that for the little shams of chivalry he has substituted
some real essence of an even deeper homage.

And we must not forget, in considering courtship, that she, too, though
she may not have greatly changed in fact, has produced an effect quite
as puzzling as the change in man. One of the German painters, possibly
under the influence of Sudermann, has shown the modern girl, assisted,
and possibly instigated by Cupid, paring hearts with a knife. But this
is an old partnership--Cupid & Co., Limited. I cannot say what sign the
firm puts up over the door in Germany. In this country it certainly
should read: “Hearts extracted without pain.”

  [Illustration]

Yes, she is cool. The caterer’s sign “Weddings Furnished,” does not,
I fear, ever give her a thrill. She asks no one to furnish a wedding
for her. She seldom appears to be in the mental situation described
by the thought-curers as one of “intense expectancy.” And she is,
it must be frankly admitted, developing a keen, a disconcerting,
critical sense, an inevitable result to be sure, yet carrying its own
bewildering effects. This is the American spirit, the inquiring spirit,
the tendency to insist upon the re-establishment of standards. The
American girl always is in the attitude of being willing to admit the
superiority of man--if he can prove it. Here enters her Americanism.
Her contention is that you cannot transmit relativity. She summons
science to show that new criteria are necessary, and she continually
is calling man into the lists to defend his titles, to repeat his
victories, or surrender the trophies.

If you look at it squarely it simply is iconoclasm, a social form
of image-breaking, the image in this case being traditional man.
Observe, however, that woman does not actually destroy the image.
She tentatively takes it down from the pedestal. Who knows but that,
having dusted it off, she may, after all, decide to put it back on
the pedestal again? Meanwhile, man is under scrutiny. It is a trying
moment. It is like an examination in a postgraduate course. The
American girl is examining man for a new degree. And man has no choice
but to struggle for it. He absolutely is without an alternative. He
must face the most exacting social service examination ever imposed by
human caution or sociological skepticism. To meet the test will be to
wear a proud title.

  [Illustration]

  [Illustration]




  [Illustration]




                                 VIII

                           THE NEW OLD MAID


  [Illustration]

The complacence of the unmarried is regarded by many as one of the most
distressing spectacles in modern life. Perhaps there is some resentment
of this as an apparent lack of faith, or at least of hope; others may
be inclined to add, of charity. Eliminate these from woman and it
may be difficult to mend the situation by making her president of a
kindergarten society.

It is natural enough that the unmarried woman rather than the unmarried
man should be the particular mark for attack. There are obvious reasons
why woman’s resentment of the unmarried man should be concealed or
disguised. Woman, outside the resolution committee at a suffrage
convention, cannot gracefully seem to resent an impairment of the
selecting instinct in man. Even though she were quite securely removed
from the possibility of social commiseration she always would be in
danger of appearing to speak with something less than strictly abstract
feeling. She knows her fundamental limitations in the casting of
missiles, and the boomerang of personalities is least to her liking. To
her, natural selection may begin to wear the appearance of a huge joke,
an immense, fantastic contradiction. “This,” she may say, “is natural,
but it is not selection.” Under the circumstances who can blame her
if she resort to a paraphrase of evolution and bewilder man by an
unnatural rejection?

Man’s resentment is more vocal, and so often does it seem to be
touched with real asperity that we well may feel that he has begun to
contemplate the situation with more than a languid interest. I suppose
there is a fair question as to who began it. Gallantry dictates that a
man should neither admit nor declare that he did. The excitements of
scientific controversy doubtless often cause the masculine debater to
overlook this obligation. Certainly it often is beyond all dispute that
the American girl has succeeded, with or without design, in affecting
man with a definite awe, and it is claimed that, in certain quarters
at least, this awe has resulted in making him afraid to marry her,
which, if it were true, would have to be regarded as a calamity of the
profoundest moment. To admit the existence of such a condition would be
deeply humiliating, since it must belittle both man and woman, though
it should be admitted that woman would appear to better advantage as a
creature that had frightened man than as one that had ceased to attract
him.

As I said one day to the Professor, science is not treating us quite
fairly in this emergency. “As a scientific person,” I said to the
Professor, “you will remember the things science once undertook to
tell us about the great dualities. ‘Witness,’ said science, with not a
glimmer of insincerity, ‘the beautiful interdependence of the two lobes
of the cerebrum! How marvellous is their union! Each individual in form
and function, yet working in an eternal harmony. One cannot get along
without the other. Let one side of the brain be hurt and the other
droops in sympathetic inactivity.’ This was lovely. It fortified every
advocate of the fitness of marriage. ‘Observe,’ we could say to the
skeptic, ‘that this duality proceeds throughout nature. Interdependence
is universal,’ and so on. But what happens? Just as we have this
impressive object lesson in good working order, along comes science,
with a frown and a cough, to remark that it was mistaken in the matter
of that absolute interdependence theory, that the brain lobes can,
after all, each get along quite well at times without the other; that
the injury or decay of one is, indeed, sometimes followed by a steady
increase in the powers of the other, one taking up the functions lost
or dropped by the other. Nor was this the worst thing that happened.
You know well enough what they used to say about the marriage of the
two lobes of the cerebrum by the _corpus callosum_. The _corpus
callosum_ at least seemed secure. We could have worried along with
the _corpus callosum_. We always could say: the lobes are highly
independent in action, but they are firmly married by this wonderful
ligament--if it is a ligament. Even this comfort is now taken from
us. Science has just rudely snatched away the _corpus callosum_.
‘The two lobes can get along without it,’ grunts science. ‘People have
lived for years with no impairment of their brain power with a totally
shrivelled _corpus callosum_.’ It is hard to keep pace with these
cynicisms of science.”

“You simply have been punishing yourself for whimsical analogies,”
remarked the Professor dryly. “Moreover, you are quoting abnormalities.”

“Alas, Professor!” I cried, “it makes little difference about the
abnormality. Admit an exception and the law is dead. We could conjure
with the law. What can we hope to do now? The American girl dotes on
exceptions--especially on illustrating them.”

  [Illustration]

“You must remember,” said the Professor, her eyes glowing solemnly,
and with the tone of being consciously judicial and at a great
altitude, “you must remember certain facts about the selecting--the
pairing--instinct. Now, in the case of man it is necessary that the
selecting instinct be special and not general. So long as a man permits
himself to think of woman as an abstraction, continues to admire
ideals of womanhood and does not seek or is not drawn to seek charms
in a particular woman, he is likely to remain a bachelor. His
instinct must be, and has become by centuries of custom, an instinct
for specific selection. On the other hand, the instinct of specific
selection so favorable to the man, is distinctly unfavorable to the
woman--that is to say, unfavorable to the woman if we accept marriage
as her natural destination. A woman who grows up with the habit of
mind which predisposes her to search for a particular man, is likely
to remain unmarried. To favor pairing in her case, the instinct toward
marriage must be general rather than specific. A woman does not select
a mate from all the men in the world, as a man is supposed to select a
mate from all the women in the world. She selects from among those who
ask her, or, at most, from the group which she may have attracted into
debatable ground.”

“But--” I interposed.

“Wait a moment,” pursued the Professor firmly. “This is not to say
that a woman has no actual right to a privilege of selecting quite
as definite as that permitted to man. It simply is saying that under
present customs an effort toward specific selection on her part is not
favorable to marriage. There may, and probably will, come a time when
custom will permit to woman a more specific selection, without hazard
as to the chance of marriage, and without loss of status on her part in
any resulting marriage.”

“I am glad,” I said, “that you have touched that point, for of course
woman could not afford to be specific at the loss of prestige. It
seems to me that the present system gives an immense advantage to
women, since, in any matrimonial emergency she may always retort,
‘Nobody asked you, sir.’ Man’s initiative gives her the benefit of
the doubt in all after judgments from the world; for if man selects
her, and she accepts him or yields to his selection, and there should
possibly be error, plainly, as with Mark Twain’s mistaken lynchers,
the joke is on him. She cannot escape responsibility, but her
responsibility always is lesser, and all the privileges of reservation
are on her side.”

“My personal opinion,” observed the Professor (I always accept this
form of approach as a great concession), “is that she loses more than
she gains by these conditions. It is generally believed that during the
past century, particularly during the past half-century, woman, and
especially the American woman, has been selecting more definitely than
at any previous time in the history of civilized society. One result
of the habit of a more specific selection on the part of woman is a
decrease in the number of early marriages among women in circles or
classes where these ideas prevail, and a general increase in the whole
number of unmarried women. It may be that a further development of this
instinct will still further increase the proportion of the unmarried,
unless custom shall so far modify the arrangement of marriages that
women may more equally participate in the selection without, as at
present, exciting the antipathy of society, or, as you have suggested,
destroying her prestige under the partnership. There is, of course, no
final reason why matrimonial partnerships should not be arranged upon a
basis of as perfect equality as any other partnership. It simply is a
question of instinct on the one hand and expediency on the other.”

  [Illustration]

I quote the Professor’s opinions here with especial gratification,
since in this instance they seem triumphantly free from sex bias,--a
freedom which, indeed, is a growing trait with women. And there is
something not always comfortable in the sign. Is the time coming when
we no longer can say, “Just like a woman”?

Perhaps we may discover that sentiment has more to do with the case
than has been supposed. If the progress of education has menaced
sentiment, who shall say that the greatest of sentiments may not be the
first to suffer? Nothing is truer than that all women are not equally
capable of sentiment. Some women seem to like the symbol of an emotion
quite as well as if it were the genuine article. To them the innocuous
make-believe of love is quite as satisfactory as the real thing. They
play with a great sentiment as they used to play with their dolls,
which gave much less trouble than real children and furnished just
as much sentimental excitement as if they actually had been alive. I
suppose this is particularly true of imaginative women, who know how
to drape their souls in nun’s garb and let their fancy play the devil.
Their character is illustrated by the modern fashion which permits them
to wear gowns sombre to superficial observation, but which, you may
have the opportunity to discover, possess a riotously crimson lining.

What is to happen to the world if women are to acquire a fondness for
the mere symbols of sex, if femininity is to become disembodied, is
a vast and vital question which prudence well might refer to one of
their own eager and tireless committees.

The other day I boldly put the thing to the Professor. “What,” I asked,
“is going to happen to the world if the number of old maids keeps on
increasing?”

“Well,” mused rather than replied the Professor, “the present rate of
increase in the number of old maids--”

“By which,” I said, “I assume that you mean hopelessly unmarried women.”

“I do not like that word,” retorted the Professor, a little sharply,
“it makes me think of hopelessly insane. I should prefer to say
affirmatively unmarried--the present rate of increase in the number
of affirmatively unmarried American women might suggest at the
first glance that something very annoying to evolution was going to
happen by-and-by. Indeed the conditions might seem to be positively
detrimental to the Darwinian hypothesis.”

“Not at all,” I protested, “if you remember the married old maids.
Their transmitted instinct is bound to count sooner or later.”

“But I have no fear that anything absurd is going to happen.” (I adored
the smile of which the Professor was guilty at this point.) “Nature
will work out the scheme. I mean supply and demand.”

“I hope you cannot mean,” I protested, “that the American girl has
deliberately set about creating a corner in wives for the sake of
raising the market--”

“Not precisely that,” returned the Professor; “though in the evolution
of altruism that might not be so absurd. But you must see that
old-maidism will not flourish unless it advantages the race somehow.
You cannot think that a girl would set about being an old maid for any
other reason than to please or profit herself--”

“Unless,” I said, “it were to get even.”

“Get even!” laughed the Professor, “think of getting even by being odd!
No. The American girl simply is experimenting in independence. If it
pays, she will keep it up. If it does not pay, she will revert to the
alternative.”

“Yes,” I admitted, “she always can do that.”

“And meanwhile,” pursued the Professor, “I insist that girl-bachelorism
must not be considered as in any sense final. The suggestion that woman
can get along without man is an impeachment of his charm and of her
wisdom. One thing is always to be remembered: a man cannot reasonably
expect to conquer a woman by not marrying her. If the girl bachelor
does not know what is good for her, if her position is untenable, if
she is losing precious time, a cynical attitude in the man bachelor
does not seem at all likely to help the matter. The presumption that
the American girl knows what she is about may be erroneous, but ill
temper in the opposition will simply fortify her. She will smile and
smile and be a spinster still.”

  [Illustration: A SPINSTER]

A spinster! How oddly the word sounded! How grotesque the contrast
between the image called up by the name and the image that fills the
eye of modern contemplation! The old maid of tradition has become a
fantastic figure, as fantastic as if she had no actual successor--which
possibly is the real fact, for old-maidism is not strictly a social
condition but a state of mind. Nothing could better demonstrate this
than the prominence and multiplicity of married old maids. It is a mere
truism to say that old-maidism is not even restricted by gender. Who
does not know the masculine old maid! He is an altogether different
creature from the normal bachelor. Indeed, _he_ sometimes is
married. In this instance contemporary satire is entirely within facts;
he alone is the new woman.

It is not always an easy matter to estimate or to define the effect
of the new-spinsterism upon the mind of the opposition. If we were
to judge from certain acrid comments, the new state of mind not only
is more affirmative, but is vastly more aggressive than the old. A
shrill tenor note here and there complains that the sopranos are
sounding with an inelegant and disproportionate vigor. There is an
ill-concealed admission that man in general is still wholly unadjusted
to the affirmative attitude on the part of woman. Man cannot open the
door for her or help her out of the coach unless she lets him precede
her. The whole structure of gallantry is built upon her acquiescence in
his leadership,--his giving upon her taking. If she is to ignore the
tradition of his leadership and goes forth upon her own account, what
is to prevent the occasional, perhaps even the frequent, awkwardness of
her actual leadership? And when she ceases to follow she already has
begun to restrain. So runs the charge. You would think, to hear some
people talk, that the modern woman should be indicted for delaying the
males.

It is hard to live down a tradition. Take the tradition about the
college girl, for example, the tradition that she is a sombre person,
strenuous, unlovely, dominated by an ambition to subdue man and
emancipate her sex by sheer force of learning. You can call up a
picture of her at work, her brain throbbing with great thoughts, her
face seared by study, greeting you with a smileless challenge to
talk to the point, mostly in Latin, and with a decent frequency in
quotations from Plato and Epictetus. This gruesome tradition makes her
the pallid, gloomy, absorbed, spectacled member of the household, with
a soul above clothes, glorying in unfeminine incapacities, shuddering
at fashion magazines and peevishly rebuking the frivolities of
girlhood. She uses vast words, communes with literary gods, and stands
forth as a sort of Book in Bloomers.

  [Illustration: THE COLLEGE GIRL OF SATIRE]

  [Illustration: THE COLLEGE GIRL OF FACT]

This, I say, is the college girl of tradition, of the older comic
papers. But what is the simple fact?--no, I cannot say the simple
fact, for she is a fact of the most complex variety; what, rather is
the literal, photographable truth? Very different, surely from the
absurdities of satire; in fact, simply the American girl, alive to
all of life, woman first and student afterward, continually up to the
mischief of teasing the social scientist by being lovely and actually
marrying, college education and all!

Yes, we are making some new traditions. The new old maid is a charming
perplexity. The old maids of the past read Plato together and
established Boston marriages. They read in Cicero and elsewhere that
friendship is less undebatable than love. The traditional old maid
talked about “the faded fire of chivalry.” Like Walpole on his Paris
journey, she “fell in love with twenty things and in hate with forty,”
which fully restored her equilibrium. Yet she did not “vow an eternal
misery,” nor grow combative at the thought that St. Chrysostom found
woman to be a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic
peril, a deadly fascination and a painted ill. She acquired a beautiful
serenity. She could read Schopenhauer’s proposition to rid the world of
old maids by establishing polygamy, without even an audible snort of
contempt. She filled her leisure by admonitions to younger girls as to
the fathomless hazards of credulity. She was securely and splendidly
detached.

Of the new old maid, variously titled, it is, of course, too early to
write. Whether she is sweeter or the world less sour, there certainly
is less antipathy between her and the world. Society certainly likes
her. She has been discovered to be immensely convenient. She has no
asperity. “It is not,” she murmurs to man, “that I love you less, but
that I love my freedom more,” for answer to which, man is sitting up o’
nights in profound thought. She does not even claim that her mood is
permanent. At the first feeling of heart failure she knows just when to
appoint a receiver.

All women can fool us some of the time, and some women can fool us all
of the time.

  [Illustration]




  [Illustration]




                                  IX

                      “AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED”


  [Illustration]

One day when the Professor had called a bachelor a bird without feet,
and I had retorted that an old maid was a bird without wings, the
Professor remarked significantly: “the old maid at least settles
better,” and we fell to talking of settling as a proposition. Between
the predicament of a bird who cannot fly and that of a bird who cannot
alight, there might not be much of a choice, though the Professor did
her utmost to prove that the bird condemned to perpetual flitting was
in the more pitiful situation. But it occurred to me as significant
that the man should dread to lose the privilege of flight, and the
woman the privilege of settling. I wondered if there was anything more
in it than the accident of contention.

We had agreed with Tolstoi, that “nothing complicates the difficulties
of life so much as a lack of harmony between married people”; we had
agreed that much of complication arose from a lack of antecedent
harmony as to the matrimonial proposition.

“Do you not think, Professor,” I asked, “that much of the trouble
comes--that most of the trouble comes--from the simple error of
forgetting that an institution cannot be better than those who
represent or expound it? Is there not a tendency, a very old one,
doubtless, to expect that marriage, in itself, will somehow, transmute
the participants? Can marriage be more of a success than people, or
less of a failure than people? Marriage is a bond, with a benediction,
if you like; but it is not a translation. Surely we cannot take from
marriage more than we carry to it--unless it might be the reasonable
and natural interest on the combined capital.”

Seeing that I was entirely serious, the Professor said: “My feeling
always has been that the chief reason for the want of success in
marriage and the deterrent spectacle it so often has presented, is the
tradition that any legerdemain of sentiment or ritual can make two
people one. Understand me, I believe wholly in the ideal of a spiritual
oneness. I have no quarrel with the Scriptures on that score. But we
cannot walk the path toward a spiritual oneness with our eyes shut,
by lying to ourselves. The interests of two people may be one in the
highest sense, they may have one aim, if they are absolutely congenial
they may have one wish; but nothing conceivable under the sky ever can
make them more or less than two people. The other day some of us were
debating whether we should say ‘seven-and-five _is_ twelve’ or
‘seven and five _are_ twelve.’ They called seven and five here
a ‘singular concept’ and some were for _is_ in consequence. But
at least man and woman _are_. One and one do not make one, they
make two. Indeed, after marriage, the two are more definitely two
than they were before. Personal sacrifice proceeds in the order of
intimacy. Society is built upon individual sacrifice. Friendship lives
by concession, and the intimacy of marriage carries to the extreme
point the idea of inter-personal compromise, the recognition of the
personality of another. To expect two people to lose, without effort,
by the mere fact of marriage, the individuality which they had before
the compact, is as absurd as it would be to take two clocks and tie
them together with a piece of pink string and expect them instantly
to begin keeping absolutely the same time. What would you find in the
case of the clocks? They might be mated clocks, and on opposite sides
of the room might pass for two clocks keeping precisely the same time.
But when you put them side by side you would discover, unless they
were supernatural clocks, that they were running some seconds apart,
and those few seconds would be as potent in visibly differentiating
the clocks thus married as a full minute or more would be on opposite
sides of the room. So that when two lovers, who have made elaborate
concession to each other before marriage, anticipating each other’s
desires, yielding to each other’s prejudices, proceed after marriage to
throw the whole burden of preserving harmony upon some vaguely defined
potentiality in the marriage relation itself, they certainly are
tempting Providence into impatience. It is the lesson of sociology that
man must pay something--yield something--for the companionship of the
other man, and the closer you wish to be to the other man the more you
must pay, the more you must yield. When it comes to the companionship
of the man and the woman, and when the woman receives or demands equal
rights and privileges, the need of concession is vastly complicated,
for now the association is not only between two persons but between two
sexes; there is both the individual equation and the sex equation.”

“Should you not be afraid, Professor, to take away this illusion?
Should we not be striking a further blow at marriage if we withheld
from those about to marry the hope, false though it be, that something
beyond themselves is going to bestow its benediction upon marriage?”

  [Illustration]

  [Illustration]

“I cannot agree,” protested the Professor, “that any kind of ignorance
can be a good thing in the end. Moreover, I think this false hope,
after doing little good, does a vast deal of harm. The trouble comes
when the two who are married, and who have looked for this magic, find
it not, find that they still are two; and when they are three, the
momentous equation must be carried forward.”

I suggested that probably there was no sex in the illusion, that the
man and the woman were alike sentimental in the matter.

“Probably,” admitted the Professor; “but as woman suffers the more by
it we are likely at times to think that her illusions must have been
deeper. I think the American girl has fewer illusions than some others,
and I think that somehow she is going to work out a higher plan than
the world has had the luck to exploit hitherto.”

“Let us hope so,” I said fervently.

The Professor turned quickly toward me. “Not,” she said, “that I think
that marriage has been, relatively, unsuccessful with us. The American
marriage has come nearer, in my opinion, to being a happy marriage than
any yet invented. The very development of the divorce system, monstrous
as that is, shows that nowadays and hereabouts people are beginning to
insist that marriages must be happy. Both before and after marriage the
American girl is asking fair play.”

“Fair play!” It was like the Professor. It was the Anglo-Saxon of
her. Fair play--even in marriage. Applause to the sentiment! If Miss
America stands for anything, if she personifies anything, I suppose
it is social fair play. Sometimes woman seems to be asking a great
deal, like the politicians, on the theory that nature is a reform
administration and will cut down the appropriation. But whatever we may
think of this, Miss America certainly is showing the influence of large
concessions. I scarcely think that investigation will indicate that she
is at all sordid. If her personal jurisdiction has thrown upon her the
need to know about a man’s income, we must not despise the candor of
her investigation. She may not agree with Perdita that “prosperity’s
the very bond of love,” but she has seen the miseries engendered in
marriages for money by lack of love, and in marriages for love by lack
of money, and she perceives that money has caused the trouble in either
case.

If marriage is a lottery, we may note that this is one of the reasons
for its popularity. The gambling instinct is strong in the human
family, and I suppose that if marriage were a sure thing it would
appeal to many with inferior force. It was a pretty Texas girl who
said: “This lottery suggestion introduces a sort of sporting element
into marriage that makes it fascinating. Marriage is the greatest game
of all.” And quite plainly she was no cynic.

But women are not such good gamblers as men. I fancy that is one of
the reasons why they turn to the last page first. They do not like
uncertainties, though they can create them. They will even marry to get
at the end of the story.

  [Illustration]

It is plain enough that Miss America is not losing her sentiment. She
can never lose her sentiment while she retains her superstitions. I do
not mean to say that she countenances the cheaper superstitions. When
I see a woman get off a street car because it is numbered thirteen,
or witness the spectacle of a hundred busy shoppers, eager to get
somewhere, held at a corner by an interminable funeral, because they
dare not cross between the carriages, I accept that safe inference,
dear to all patriots, that the victims are foreign. In what we might
call the higher superstitions she is versed and even proficient.

Speaking of superstitions, no better name belongs to that prejudice by
which it sometimes is held that Miss America is often too tall to pair
well, that the bride is not exemplifying a proper proportion. Who shall
challenge the processes of evolution? Who shall say that in a wiser era
folks may not like the new proportions better? Probably there is no
occasion to worry. In this Darwinized era we cannot be persuaded that
she very well can get to be taller unless she wants to be, or unless
she is preferred that way. If gallantry lags, patriotism will insist
that the more we see of her the better we like her.

Did you ever see a bridal scrap-book? A Tennessee girl, wedded a year,
unfolded one for me, and it proved to be a wonderful affair. In the
early pages were pasted invitations, dancing cards, concert and theatre
programs, tinfoil from bouquets, ribbons from gifts, valentines and
a curious miscellany of souvenirs. Then came the cover from the box
that had held the engagement-ring, a copy of the wedding invitation,
newspaper comments on the engagement and the wedding. Later pages held
a railroad map showing the wedding journey, Pullman car vouchers,
express labels, hotel menus, miniature camera “views,” with much more
that I cannot remember. And on a certain page of this scrap book,
reserved somehow, for the purpose, all of the guests at the wedding
had written their names. A few months after the wedding the husband
fell ill, and at the crisis his young wife chanced to find that the
list of names in the book omitted, among all of those who were at the
wedding, his alone. She was not superstitious, but the absence of that
name filled her with a new terror. The thing preyed upon her, and in
the still of night she slipped into the sick-room with book and pen,
and taking her husband’s unconscious hand, she traced his name there
upon the right page. He did not die, and when, one day, he came upon
the tremulous lines of that grotesque autograph, he did not chide the
forger.

We may have changed the names of some things, the cool breath of
realism may have touched the habits of our modern life, but probably
the heartbeat of sentiment to-day is not greatly faster or slower
than in the long ago. There was a noble tenderness and dignity in
some of the formalities of the past, as when John Winthrop began his
letter with: “Most kinde Ladie, Your sweete lettres coming from the
abundance of your love were joyefully received into the closet of my
best affections.” We do not say, “My only beloved Spouse, my most sweet
friend & faithful companion of my pilgrimage,” but let us hope that
nothing of the intrinsic beauty of love and marriage has suffered any
real loss.

  [Illustration]

  [Illustration]

Distrust those who seek to show that there is a discordant note in
the old tune of love. Distrust those who claim that the old harmonies
have been superseded, that the new chords are less sweet than the old,
that the eternal duet which has tinkled and murmured down the ages
ever will be ended. The strings and the keys are new, but the tune
is the old tune. All the new notes and the new titles, and the new
words are but an obbligato, an ornament to the love-motive glowing
like a golden strain in the majestic symphony of life--the recurring
melody always new, always old; always a surprise, always as certain
as spring; so conquering in its power that Miss America, with all of
her self-reliance, with all of her assumed superiority to wizard wiles
and incantations, falls under the spell and has no regret. She is as
willing as ever she was to sit at the feet of the right man. She knows
her woman’s power. She is as willing as ever to follow a leader. She
only asks that she may elect her leader, not with a ballot, but with
the benediction of her love. She knows, with her truest insight, that
there is no device of science, nor ideal of sentiment that ever has
been or ever can be a substitute in this world for the love of one man
for one woman and of that one woman for that man. She sees down the
long road of life, alternating patches of sunlight and shadow, chances
of trial, certainties of pain, but she sees no cowardly doubt of the
nobility and the triumph of her free choice. The snows of time will
whiten her hair, and what better fate can she ask from the giver of
gifts than that she may sit there, as in the other years, beside her
re-elected leader in some hour of peaceful communion; to look back on
the paths of their journey, and forward over the long road, recalling
the joys and sorrows of the pilgrimage, and realizing here as at the
beginning that the stoutest defence against the shafts of fate is the
divine ægis of love....

       *       *       *       *       *

  [Illustration]

The Professor had come into the room girded for one of her intermittent
departures into the outer world. I thought then, and it has seemed to
me since, that she never presented a more agreeable spectacle than at
that moment. She dawned so radiantly there that I never could remember
what she wore, save that it was a new gown with a pale becoming pink
somewhere.

“Professor,” I said, helpless before her discovery of my glance, “woman
is the only product of civilization which we might praise to excess, if
we ever found the words, without critical resentment.”

“You always are either rampantly sentimental,” she said over the last
button of her glove, “or remorsefully satirical.”

“I protest, Professor, that now I am neither. At this instant,
Professor, you are reminding me anew of the infinite variety of woman.
It may be that there is something in the raiment, but you, quite
typically, I fancy, burst upon me in fresh phases, fresh flavors. A man
is a mixture to be sure, a medicine, if you like, or a mixed drink.
But a woman is a _pousse café_, never twice the same nectar, and
one drains the glass delighted and confused.”

“I have no means of estimating your comparison,” returned the
Professor, “for I never tasted a _pousse café_. I fancy it is
degenerate.”

“Should you ever test my symbolism, Professor, you will, I think, admit
that it is more accurate than Thackeray’s comparison of a woman’s
heart with a lithographer’s stone. ‘What is once written there,’ he
says, ‘never can be rubbed out.’ Now if Thackeray had known anything
at all about lithographers’ stones, he would have known that they are
used continuously for new writings until they have become too thin for
service. Thackeray would have given woman more of the benefit of the
doubt if he had called her heart a palimpsest. You sometimes can make
out something more than the very last writing on a palimpsest.”

“I am afraid,” murmured the Professor, with a glance that puzzled me,
“that you would not be able to read even that last writing.”

“Alas! Professor, I never have boasted any dexterity as an expert in
love’s handwriting.”

“You are a man,” she said briefly.

“Is there a last writing on your heart, Professor?”

“Yes,” she answered, a little startled, yet speaking quietly, “there is
a first and a last in one, and the ink isn’t dry, either.”

  [Illustration]

“You don’t mean--”

“Yes, I do,” she added firmly; “I have been intending to tell you about
it.”

“You are--not going to be--married?”

“Yes.”

“Professor!” I had breath but for that one gasp. “And you never said a
word!”

“Yes, I did--to him.” Then, seeing my look, “I wanted to tease you a
little; but I am going to tell you all about it--very soon.”

“I suppose,” I said, after a pause, “it is that fellow who was hurt at
Santiago?”

“The very same.”

There was a little awkward silence. Then I arose and stood near her,
and she glanced up at me with a droll, fluttering smile. “Does he
understand women?”

“No,” she replied softly, yet with some of her old spirit, “he isn’t so
foolish as to try. He only understands--me.”

“Oh,” I said.

It was dusk. Somehow the moment was like the end of a chapter. A
strange thing had happened, and the Professor---- Who can describe that
change which follows the oldest and newest of miracles? It was not the
same Professor who shimmered there in the twilight.... No, not the
same. Something had gone. And there was a new light in those dauntless
eyes.

A little later I saw her at the door, her little gloved hand cajoling
for a moment the rebellious bronze of her back hair. I saw her through
the window as on the steps she gathered the loose of her gown, flashing
the fire of her flounce lining. I saw her flicker for a moment in the
windy street. And she was gone.

  [Illustration]