"It doesn't suit you at all," I answered.
"You're very disagreeable," said she, "I shan't ever ask your advice
again."
"Nobody," I hastened to add, "would look well in it. You, of course,
look less awful in it than any other woman would, but it's not your
style."
"He means," exclaimed the Minor Poet, "that the thing itself not being
pre-eminently beautiful, it does not suit, is not in agreement with you.
The contrast between you and anything approaching the ugly or the
commonplace, is too glaring to be aught else than displeasing."
"He didn't say it," replied the Woman of the World; "and besides it isn't
ugly. It's the very latest fashion."
"Why is it," asked the Philosopher, "that women are such slaves to
fashion? They think clothes, they talk clothes, they read clothes, yet
they have never understood clothes. The purpose of dress, after the
primary object of warmth has been secured, is to adorn, to beautify the
particular wearer. Yet not one woman in a thousand stops to consider
what colours will go best with her complexion, what cut will best hide
the defects or display the advantages of her figure. If it be the
fashion, she must wear it. And so we have pale-faced girls looking
ghastly in shades suitable to dairy-maids, and dots waddling about in
costumes fit and proper to six-footers. It is as if crows insisted on
wearing cockatoo's feathers on their heads, and rabbits ran about with
peacocks' tails fastened behind them."
"And are not you men every bit as foolish?" retorted the Girton Girl.
"Sack coats come into fashion, and dumpy little men trot up and down in
them, looking like butter-tubs on legs. You go about in July melting
under frock-coats and chimney-pot hats, and because it is the stylish
thing to do, you all play tennis in still shirts and stand-up collars,
which is idiotic. If fashion decreed that you should play cricket in a
pair of top-boots and a diver's helmet, you would play cricket in a pair
of top-boots and a diver's helmet, and dub every sensible fellow who
didn't a cad. It's worse in you than in us; men are supposed to think
for themselves, and to be capable of it, the womanly woman isn't."
"Big women and little men look well in nothing," said the Woman of the
World. "Poor Emily was five foot ten and a half, and never looked an
inch under seven foot, whatever she wore. Empires came into fashion, and
the poor child looked like the giant's baby in a pantomime. We thought
the Greek might help her, but it only suggested a Crystal Palace statue
tied up in a sheet, and tied up badly; and when puff-sleeves and shoulder-
capes were in and Teddy stood up behind her at a water-party and sang
'Under the spreading chestnut-tree,' she took it as a personal insult and
boxed his ears. Few men liked to be seen with her, and I'm sure George
proposed to her partly with the idea of saving himself the expense of a
step-ladder, she reaches down his boots for him from the top shelf."
"I," said the Minor Poet, "take up the position of not wanting to waste
my brain upon the subject. Tell me what to wear, and I will wear it, and
there is an end of the matter. If Society says, 'Wear blue shirts and
white collars,' I wear blue shirts and white collars. If she says, 'The
time has now come when hats should be broad-brimmed,' I take unto myself
a broad-brimmed hat. The question does not interest me sufficiently for
me to argue it. It is your fop who refuses to follow fashion. He wishes
to attract attention to himself by being peculiar. A novelist whose
books pass unnoticed, gains distinction by designing his own necktie; and
many an artist, following the line of least resistance, learns to let his
hair grow instead of learning to paint."
"The fact is," remarked the Philosopher, "we are the mere creatures of
fashion. Fashion dictates to us our religion, our morality, our
affections, our thoughts. In one age successful cattle-lifting is a
virtue, a few hundred years later company-promoting takes its place as a
respectable and legitimate business. In England and America Christianity
is fashionable, in Turkey, Mohammedanism, and 'the crimes of Clapham are
chaste in Martaban.' In Japan a woman dresses down to the knees, but
would be considered immodest if she displayed bare arms. In Europe it is
legs that no pure-minded woman is supposed to possess. In China we
worship our mother-in-law and despise our wife; in England we treat our
wife with respect, and regard our mother-in-law as the bulwark of comic
journalism. The stone age, the iron age, the age of faith, the age of
infidelism, the philosophic age, what are they but the passing fashions
of the world? It is fashion, fashion, fashion wherever we turn. Fashion
waits beside our cradle to lead us by the hand through life. Now
literature is sentimental, now hopefully humorous, now psychological, now
new-womanly. Yesterday's pictures are the laughing-stock of the up-to-
date artist of to-day, and to-day's art will be sneered at to-morrow. Now
it is fashionable to be democratic, to pretend that no virtue or wisdom
can exist outside corduroy, and to abuse the middle classes. One season
we go slumming, and the next we are all socialists. We think we are
thinking; we are simply dressing ourselves up in words we do not
understand for the gods to laugh at us."
"Don't be pessimistic," retorted the Minor Poet, "pessimism is going out.
You call such changes fashions, I call them the footprints of progress.
Each phase of thought is an advance upon the former, bringing the
footsteps of the many nearer to the landmarks left by the mighty climbers
of the past upon the mountain paths of truth. The crowd that was
satisfied with _The Derby Day_ now appreciates Millet. The public that
were content to wag their heads to _The Bohemian Girl_ have made Wagner
popular."
"And the play lovers, who stood for hours to listen to Shakespeare,"
interrupted the Philosopher, "now crowd to music-halls."
"The track sometimes descends for a little way, but it will wind upwards
again," returned the Poet. "The music-hall itself is improving; I
consider it the duty of every intellectual man to visit such places. The
mere influence of his presence helps to elevate the tone of the
performance. I often go myself!"
"I was looking," said the Woman of the World, "at some old illustrated
papers of thirty years ago, showing the men dressed in those very absurd
trousers, so extremely roomy about the waist, and so extremely tight
about the ankles. I recollect poor papa in them; I always used to long
to fill them out by pouring in sawdust at the top."
"You mean the peg-top period," I said. "I remember them distinctly
myself, but it cannot be more than three-and-twenty years ago at the
outside."
"That is very nice of you," replied the Woman of the World, "and shows
more tact than I should have given you credit for. It could, as you say,
have been only twenty-three years ago. I know I was a very little girl
at the time. I think there must be some subtle connection between
clothes and thought. I cannot imagine men in those trousers and
Dundreary whiskers talking as you fellows are talking now, any more than
I could conceive of a woman in a crinoline and a poke bonnet smoking a
cigarette. I think it must be so, because dear mother used to be the
most easy-going woman in the world in her ordinary clothes, and would let
papa smoke all over the house. But about once every three weeks she
would put on a hideous old-fashioned black silk dress, that looked as if
Queen Elizabeth must have slept in it during one of those seasons when
she used to go about sleeping anywhere, and then we all had to sit up.
'Look out, ma's got her black silk dress on,' came to be a regular
formula. We could always make papa take us out for a walk or a drive by
whispering it to him."
"I can never bear to look at those pictures of by-gone fashions," said
the Old Maid, "I see the by-gone people in them, and it makes me feel as
though the faces that we love are only passing fashions with the rest. We
wear them for a little while upon our hearts, and think so much of them,
and then there comes a time when we lay them by, and forget them, and
newer faces take their place, and we are satisfied. It seems so sad."
"I wrote a story some years ago," remarked the Minor Poet, "about a young
Swiss guide, who was betrothed to a laughing little French peasant girl."
"Named Suzette," interrupted the Girton Girl. "I know her. Go on."
"Named Jeanne," corrected the Poet, "the majority of laughing French
girls, in fiction, are named Suzette, I am well aware. But this girl's
mother's family was English. She was christened Jeanne after an aunt
Jane, who lived in Birmingham, and from whom she had expectations."
"I beg your pardon," apologised the Girton Girl, "I was not aware of that
fact. What happened to her?"
"One morning, a few days before the date fixed for the wedding," said the
Minor Poet, "she started off to pay a visit to a relative living in the
village, the other side of the mountain. It was a dangerous track,
climbing half-way up the mountain before it descended again, and skirting
more than one treacherous slope, but the girl was mountain born and bred,
sure-footed as a goat, and no one dreamed of harm."
"She went over, of course," said the Philosopher, "those sure-footed
girls always do."
"What happened," replied the Minor Poet, "was never known. The girl was
never seen again."
"And what became of her lover?" asked the Girton Girl. "Was he, when
next year's snow melted, and the young men of the village went forth to
gather Edelweiss, wherewith to deck their sweethearts, found by them
dead, beside her, at the bottom of the crevasse?"
"No," said the Poet; "you do not know this story, you had better let me
tell it. Her lover returned the morning before the wedding day, to be
met with the news. He gave way to no sign of grief, he repelled all
consolation. Taking his rope and axe he went up into the mountain by
himself. All through the winter he haunted the track by which she must
have travelled, indifferent to the danger that he ran, impervious
apparently to cold, or hunger, or fatigue, undeterred by storm, or mist,
or avalanche. At the beginning of the spring he returned to the village,
purchased building utensils, and day after day carried them back with him
up into the mountain. He hired no labour, he rejected the proffered
assistance of his brother guides. Choosing an almost inaccessible spot,
at the edge of the great glacier, far from all paths, he built himself a
hut, with his own hands; and there for eighteen years he lived alone.
"In the 'season' he earned good fees, being known far and wide as one of
the bravest and hardiest of all the guides, but few of his clients liked
him, for he was a silent, gloomy man, speaking little, and with never a
laugh or jest on the journey. Each fall, having provisioned himself, he
would retire to his solitary hut, and bar the door, and no human soul
would set eyes on him again until the snows melted.
"One year, however, as the spring days wore on, and he did not appear
among the guides, as was his wont, the elder men, who remembered his
story and pitied him, grew uneasy; and, after much deliberation, it was
determined that a party of them should force their way up to his eyrie.
They cut their path across the ice where no foot among them had trodden
before, and finding at length the lonely snow-encompassed hut, knocked
loudly with their axe-staves on the door; but only the whirling echoes
from the glacier's thousand walls replied, so the foremost put his strong
shoulder to the worn timber and the door flew open with a crash.
"They found him dead, as they had more than half expected, lying stiff
and frozen on the rough couch at the farther end of the hut; and, beside
him, looking down upon him with a placid face, as a mother might watch
beside her sleeping child, stood Jeanne. She wore the flowers pinned to
her dress that she had gathered when their eyes had last seen her. The
girl's face that had laughed back to their good-bye in the village,
nineteen years ago.
"A strange steely light clung round her, half illuminating, half
obscuring her, and the men drew back in fear, thinking they saw a vision,
till one, bolder than the rest, stretched out his hand and touched the
ice that formed her coffin.
"For eighteen years the man had lived there with this face that he had
loved. A faint flush still lingered on the fair cheeks, the laughing
lips were still red. Only at one spot, above her temple, the wavy hair
lay matted underneath a clot of blood."
The Minor Poet ceased.
"What a very unpleasant way of preserving one's love!" said the Girton
Girl.
"When did the story appear?" I asked. "I don't remember reading it."
"I never published it," explained the Minor Poet. "Within the same week
two friends of mine, one of whom had just returned from Norway and the
other from Switzerland, confided to me their intention of writing stories
about girls who had fallen into glaciers, and who had been found by their
friends long afterwards, looking as good as new; and a few days later I
chanced upon a book, the heroine of which had been dug out of a glacier
alive three hundred years after she had fallen in. There seemed to be a
run on ice maidens, and I decided not to add to their number."
"It is curious," said the Philosopher, "how there seems to be a fashion
even in thought. An idea has often occurred to me that has seemed to me
quite new, and taking up a newspaper I have found that some man in Russia
or San Francisco has just been saying the very same thing in almost the
very same words. We say a thing is 'in the air'; it is more true than we
are aware of. Thought does not grow in us. It is a thing apart, we
simply gather it. All truths, all discoveries, all inventions, they have
not come to us from any one man. The time grows ripe for them, and from
this corner of the earth and from that, hands, guided by some instinct,
grope for and grasp them. Buddha and Christ seize hold of the morality
needful to civilisation, and promulgate it, unknown to one another, the
one on the shores of the Ganges, the other by the Jordan. A dozen
forgotten explorers, _feeling_ America, prepared the way for Columbus to
discover it. A deluge of blood is required to sweep away old follies,
and Rousseau and Voltaire, and a myriad others are set to work to fashion
the storm clouds. The steam-engine, the spinning loom is 'in the air.' A
thousand brains are busy with them, a few go further than the rest. It
is idle to talk of human thought; there is no such thing. Our minds are
fed as our bodies with the food God has provided for us. Thought hangs
by the wayside, and we pick it and cook it, and eat it, and cry out what
clever 'thinkers' we are!"
"I cannot agree with you," replied the Minor Poet, "if we were simply
automata, as your argument would suggest, what was the purpose of
creating us?"
"The intelligent portion of mankind has been asking itself that question
for many ages," returned the Philosopher.
"I hate people who always think as I do," said the Girton Girl; "there
was a girl in our corridor who never would disagree with me. Every
opinion I expressed turned out to be her opinion also. It always
irritated me."
"That might have been weak-mindedness," said the Old Maid, which sounded
ambiguous.
"It is not so unpleasant as having a person always disagreeing with you,"
said the Woman of the World. "My cousin Susan never would agree with any
one. If I came down in red she would say, 'Why don't you try green,
dear? every one says you look so well in green'; and when I wore green
she would say, 'Why have you given up red dear? I thought you rather
fancied yourself in red.' When I told her of my engagement to Tom, she
burst into tears and said she couldn't help it. She had always felt that
George and I were intended for one another; and when Tom never wrote for
two whole months, and behaved disgracefully in--in other ways, and I told
her I was engaged to George, she reminded me of every word I had ever
said about my affection for Tom, and of how I had ridiculed poor George.
Papa used to say, 'If any man ever tells Susan that he loves her, she
will argue him out of it, and will never accept him until he has jilted
her, and will refuse to marry him every time he asks her to fix the
day."'
"Is she married?" asked the Philosopher.
"Oh, yes," answered the Woman of the World, "and is devoted to her
children. She lets them do everything they don't want to."