The Manly Maiden may be defined as the feminine exaggeration of those
rougher qualities which men display in their intercourse with one
another, or in the pursuit of those sports in which courage, strength,
and endurance play a part. In a fatal moment she conceives the idea
that she can earn the proud title of "a good fellow" by emulating
the fashions and the habits of the robuster sex. She perceives that
men have a liking for men who are strong, bluff, outspoken, and
contemptuous of peril, and she infers mistakenly, that the same
tribute of admiration is certain to be paid to a woman who, setting
the traditions of her sex at defiance, consciously apes the manly
model without a thought of all that the imitation involves. She
forgets that as soon as a woman steps down of her own free will from
the pedestal on which the chivalrous admiration of men has placed her,
she abandons at once her claim to that flattering reticence of speech,
and that specially attentive courtesy of bearing, which are in men the
outward and visible signs of the spiritual grace which they assume
as an attribute of all women. In spite of what the crazy theorists
of the perfect equality school may say, men still continue to expect
and to admire in women precisely those qualities in which they feel
themselves to be chiefly deficient. Their reverence and affection are
bestowed upon her whose voice is ever soft, gentle and low, and whose
mild influence is shed like a balm upon the labours and troubles of
life. Of slang, and of slaps upon the back, of strength, whether of
language or of body, they get enough and to spare amongst themselves,
and they are scarcely to be blamed if at certain moments they should
prefer refinement to roughness, and gentleness to gentlemen. However,
these obvious considerations have no weight with the Manly Maiden.
In fact they never occur to her, and hence arise failures, and
humiliations, and disappointments not a few.
[Illustration]
The Manly Maiden is not, as a rule, the natural product of a genuine
country life. The daughter of rich parents, who have spent a great
part of their lives in a centre of commercial activity, she is
introduced to a new home in the country at about the age of fourteen.
Seeing that all those who live in the neighbourhood are in one way or
another associated with outdoor sports, and that the favour in which
the men are held and their fame vary directly as their power to ride
or to shoot straight, she becomes possessed by the notion that she too
must, if she is to please at all, be proficient in the sports of men.
Merely to ride to hounds is, of course, not sufficiently distinctive.
Many women do that, without losing at all the ordinary characteristics
of women. She must ride bare-backed, she must understand a horse's
ailments and his points, she must trudge (in the constant society of
men) over fallows and through turnips in pursuit of partridges, she
must be able to talk learnedly of guns, of powders, and of shot, she
must possess a gun of her own, and think she knows how to use it, she
must own a retriever, and herself make him submissive by the frequent
application of a silver-headed dog-whip.
These attainments are her ideals of earthly bliss, and she sets out
to realise them with a terrible perseverance. Her father, of course,
knows but little of sport. He is, however, afflicted with the ordinary
desire to shine as a sportsman, and as a host of sportsmen. He
stocks his coverts with game, and invites large shooting parties to
stay with him. He himself takes to a gun as a hen might take to the
water; although, as his daughter contemptuously expresses it, he is
calculated to miss a hippopotamus at ten yards, he seems to imagine,
if one may be permitted to judge from the wild frequency of his shots,
that it is the easiest thing in the world to hit a pheasant or a
partridge flying at ten times that distance. From such a father the
Manly Maiden easily secures permission, first of all, to walk with the
men while they are shooting, and subsequently to carry a gun herself.
And now the difficulties of the situation begin to make themselves
felt, not, indeed, by her, for she remains sublimely unconscious to
the end, but by the men who are compelled to associate with her upon
her ventures. No man will ever hesitate to rebuke another for carrying
his gun in such a way as to threaten danger; but, when a lady allows
him to inspect the inside of her loaded gun-barrels, or shoots down
the line at an evasive rabbit, he must suffer in silence, and can only
seek compensation for restraining his tongue by incontinently removing
his body to a safe place, where he can neither shoot nor be shot. At
luncheon, however, he may be gratified by hearing the Manly Maiden
rally him on the poor result of his morning's sport. She will then
favour him, at length, with her opinions as to how a driven partridge
or a rocketing pheasant should be shot, flavouring her discourse with
copious extracts from the Badminton books on shooting, and adding here
and there imaginative reminiscences of her own exploits in dealing
death. In the hunting-field she will lose her groom, and babble sport
to the Master, with whom she further ingratiates herself by rating and
lashing one of his favourite hounds, or by heading the fox whenever
he attempts to break away. She then crosses him at an awkward fence,
and considers herself aggrieved by the strong language which breaks
irresistibly from the fallen sportsman's lips. Later on she astonishes
an elderly follower of the hounds by asking him for a draught from his
flask, and completes his amazement by complaining of the thoughtless
manner in which he has diluted his brandy.
In the evening she will narrate her adventures at length, amidst
a chorus of admiring comments from her fond parents, and their
parasites, and will follow up her triumphs of the day by pursuing the
men into the smoking-room, where she permits one of them to offer
her a cigarette, and imagines that she delights him by accepting it.
On such an occasion she will inform one of her friends that, on the
whole, she has but a poor opinion of Diana of the Ephesians, seeing
that she only hunted with women, and never allowed men to approach
her. From this it may be inferred that her stock of classical
allusions is not quite so accurate and complete as that of a genuine
sportswoman should be. Next morning she may be seen schooling her
horses in the park. She has a touching faith in the use both of spur
and of whip whenever the occasion seems least to demand them, and
she despises the man who rides without rowels, and reverences one who
attempts impossible jumps without discrimination. During the summer
she spends a considerable part of her time in "getting fit" for the
labours of the autumn and winter. Sometimes she even plays cricket,
and has been known to address the ball that bowled her in highly
uncomplimentary terms.
So the years pass on. She never learns that it is possible for a woman
on certain occasions to be in the way of men, nor does her accuracy
or her care with a gun increase. If she marries at all, she will marry
some feeble creature who has no feeling for sport, and over whom she
can lord it to her heart's content. But it is more probable that she
will remain unwedded, and will develop eventually from a would-be
harding-riding maiden, into a genuinely hard-featured old maid.
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