well-dressed and for the most part have their tempers under control.
Some of the women play well, and some sing prettily. There are always
to be found a sufficient number of the middle-aged of either sex to
make up a whist-table, where the game is sound and sometimes
brilliant; and there are sure to be men who play billiards creditably
and with a crisp, clean stroke worth looking at. And there are very
often lively women who make amusement for the rest. But these are
smartly handled behind backs, though they are petted in public and
undeniably useful to the society at large.
The nomadic widow is by some odd fatality generally the widow of an
officer, naval or military, to whose rank she attaches an almost
superstitious value, thinking that when she can announce herself as
the relict of a major or an admiral she has given an unanswerable
guarantee and smoothed away all difficulties. She may have many
daughters, but more probably she has only one;--for where
olive-branches abound nomadism is more expensive than housekeeping,
and to live in one's own house is less costly than to live in a
boarding-house. But of this one daughter the nomadic widow makes much
to the community; and especially calls attention to her simplicity and
absolute ignorance of the evils so familiar to the girls of the
present day. And she looks as if she expects to be believed. Perhaps
credence is difficult; the young lady in question having been for some
years considerably in public, where she has learnt to take care of
herself with a skill which, how much soever it may be deserving of
praise, can scarcely claim to be called ingenuous. She has need of
this skill; for, apparently, she and her mother have no male relations
belonging to them, and if flirtations are common with the nomadic
tribe, marriages are rare. Poor souls; one cannot but pity them for
all their labour in vain, all their abortive hopes. For though there
is more society in the mode of life they have chosen than they would
have had if they had lived quietly down in the village where they were
known and respected, and where, who knows? the fairy prince might one
day have alighted--there are very few chances; and marriages among
'the inmates' are as rare as winter swallows.
The men who live in these places, whether as nomadic or permanent
guests, never have money enough to marry on; and the flirtations
always budding and blossoming by the piano or about the billiard-table
never by any chance fructify in marriage. But in spite of their
infertile experience you see the same mother and the same daughter
year after year, season after season, returning to the charge with
renewed vigour, and a hope which is the one indestructible thing about
them. Let us deal tenderly with them, poor impecunious nomads;
drifting like so much sea-wrack along the restless current of life;
and wish them some safe resting-place before it is too late.
A lady nomad of this kind, especially one with a daughter, is strictly
orthodox and cultivates with praiseworthy perseverance the society of
any clergyman who may have wandered into the community of which she is
a member. She is punctual in church-going; and the minister is
flattered by her evident appreciation of his sermons, and the
readiness with which she can remember certain points of last Sunday's
discourse. As a rule she is Evangelically inclined, and is as
intolerant of Romanism on the one hand as of Rationalism on the other.
She has seen the evils of both, she says, and quotes the state of Rome
and of Heidelberg in confirmation. She is as strict in morals as in
orthodoxy, and no woman who has got herself talked about, however
innocently, need hope for much mercy at her hands. Her Rhadamanthine
faculty has apparently ample occasion for exercise, for her list of
scandalous chronicles is extensive; and if she is to be believed, she
and her daughter are almost the sole examples of a pure and untainted
womanhood afloat. She is as rigid too, in all matters connected with
her social status; and brings up her daughter in the same way of
thinking. By virtue of the admiral or the major, at peace in his
grave, they are emphatically ladies; and, though nomadic, impecunious,
homeless, and _tant soit peu_ adventuresses, they class themselves as
of the cream of the cream, and despise those whose rank is of the
uncovenanted kind, and who are gentry, may be, by the grace of God
only without any Act of Parliament to help.
Sometimes the lady nomad is a spinster, not necessarily _passée_,
though obviously she cannot be in her first youth; still she may be
young enough to be attractive, and adventurous enough to care to
attract. Women of this kind, unmarried, nomadic and still young, work
themselves into every movement afoot. They even face the perils and
discomforts of war-time, and tell their friends at home that they are
going out as nurses to the wounded. That dash of the adventuress, of
which we have spoken before, runs through all this section of the
social nomads; and one wonders why some uncle or cousin, some aunt or
family friend, does not catch them up in time.
If not attractive nor passably young, these nomadic spinsters are sure
to be exceedingly odd. Constant friction with society in its most
selfish form, the absence of home-duties, the want of the sweetness
and sincerity of home love, and the habit of change, bring out all
that is worst in them and kill all that is best. They have nothing to
hope for from society and less to lose; it is wearisome to look
amiable and sweet-tempered when you feel bitter and disappointed; and
politeness is a farce where the fact of the day is a fight. So the
nomadic spinster who has lived so long in this rootless way that she
has ceased even to make such fleeting friendships as the mode of life
affords--has ceased even to wear the transparent mark of such thin
politeness as is required--becomes a 'character' notorious in
proportion to her candour. She never stays long in one establishment,
and generally leaves abruptly because of a misunderstanding with some
other lady, or maybe because some gentleman has unwittingly affronted
her. She and the officer's widow are always on peculiarly unfriendly
terms, for she resents the pretensions of the officer's daughter, and
calls her a bold minx or a sly puss almost within hearing; while she
throws grave doubts on the widow herself, and drops hints which the
rest of the community gather up like manna, and keep by them, to much
the same result as that of the wilderness. But the nomadic spinster
soon wanders away to another temporary resting-place; and before half
her life is done she becomes as well known to the heads of the various
establishments in her line as the taxgatherer himself, and dreaded
almost as much.
Nomads are generally remarkable for not leaving tracks behind them.
You see them here and there, and they are sure to turn up at
Baden-Baden or at Vichy, at Scarborough or at Dieppe, when you least
expect them; but you know nothing about them in the interim. They are
like those birds which hybernate at some place of retreat no one yet
ever found; or like those which migrate, who can tell where? They come
and they go. You meet and part and meet again in all manner of
unlikely places; and it seems to you that they have been over half the
world since you last met, you meanwhile having settled quietly to your
work, save for your summer holiday which you are now taking, and which
you are enjoying as the nomad cannot enjoy any change that falls to
his lot. He is sated with change; wearied of novelty; yet unable to
fix himself, however much he may wish it. He has got into the habit of
change; and the habit clings even when the desire has gone. Always
hoping to be at rest, always intending to settle as years flow on, he
never finds the exact place to suit him; only when he feels the end
approaching, and by reason of old age and infirmity is a nuisance in
the community where formerly he was an acquisition, and where too all
that once gave him pleasure has now become an insupportable burden and
weariness--only then does he creep away into some obscure and lonely
lodging, where he drags out his remaining days alone, and dies without
the touch of one loved hand to smooth his pillow, without the sound of
one dear voice to whisper to him courage, farewell, and hope. The home
he did not plant when he might is impossible to him now, and there is
no love that endures if there is no home in which to keep it. And so
all the class of social nomads find when dark days are on them, and
society, which cares only to be amused, deserts them in their hour of
greatest need.
_GREAT GIRLS._
Nothing is more distinctive among women than the difference of
relative age to be found between them. Two women of the same number of
years will be substantially of different epochs of life--the one faded
in person, wearied in mind, fossilized in sympathy; the other fresh
both in face and feeling, with sympathies as broad and keen as they
were when she was in her first youth; with a brain still as receptive,
as quick to learn, a temper still as easy to be amused, as ready to
love, as when she emerged from the school-room to the drawing-room.
The one you suspect of understating her age by half-a-dozen years or
more when she tells you she is not over forty; the other makes you
wonder if she has not overstated hers by just so much when she
laughingly confesses to the same age. The one is an old woman who
seems as if she had never been young, the other 'just a great girl
yet,' who seems as if she would never grow old; and nothing is equal
between them but the number of days each has lived.
This kind of woman, so fresh and active, so intellectually as well as
emotionally alive, is never anything but a girl; never loses some of
the sweetest characteristics of girlhood. You see her first as a young
wife and mother, and you imagine she has left the school-room for
about as many months as she has been married years. Her face has none
of that untranslatable expression, that look of robbed bloom, which
experience gives; in her manner is none of the preoccupation so
observable in most young mothers, whose attention never seems wholly
given to the thing on hand, and whose hearts seem always full of a
secret care or an unimparted joy. Brisk and airy, braving all
weathers, ready for any amusement, interested in the current questions
of history and society, by some wonderful faculty of organizing
seeming to have all her time to herself as if she had no house cares
and no nursery duties, yet these somehow not neglected, she is the
very ideal of a happy girl roving through life as through a daisy
field, on whom sorrow has not yet laid its hand and to whose lot has
fallen no Dead Sea apple. And when one hears her name and style for
the first time as a matron, and sees her with two or three sturdy
little fellows hanging about her slender neck and calling her mamma,
one feels as if nature had somehow made a mistake, and that our slim
and simple-mannered damsel had only made-believe to have taken up the
serious burdens of life, and was nothing but a great girl after all.
Grown older she is still the great girl she was ten years ago, if her
type of girlishness is a little changed and her gaiety of manner a
little less persistent. But even now, with a big boy at Eton and a
daughter whose presentation is not so far off, she is younger than her
staid and melancholy sister, her junior by many years, who has gone in
for the Immensities and the Worship of Sorrow, who thinks laughter the
sign of a vacant mind, and that to be interesting and picturesque a
woman must have unserviceable nerves and a defective digestion. Her
sister looks as if all that makes life worth living for lies behind
her, and only the grave is beyond; she, the great girl, with her
bright face and even temper, believes that her future will be as
joyous as her present, as innocent as her past, as full of love and as
purely happy. She has known some sorrows truly, and she has gained
such experience as comes only through the rending of the
heart-strings; but nothing that she has passed through has seared nor
soured her, and if it has taken off just the lighter edge of her
girlishness it has left the core as bright and cheery as ever.
In person she is generally of the style called 'elegant' and
wonderfully young in mere physical appearance. Perhaps sharp eyes
might spy out here and there a little silver thread among the soft
brown hair; and when fatigued or set in a cross light, lines not quite
belonging to the teens may be traced about her eyes and mouth; but in
favourable conditions, with her graceful figure advantageously draped
and her fair face flushed and animated, she looks just a great girl,
no more; and she feels as she looks. It is well for her if her husband
is a wise man, and more proud of her than he is jealous; for he must
submit to see her admired by all the men who know her, according to
their individual manner of expressing admiration. But as purity of
nature and singleness of heart belong to her qualification for great
girlishness, he has no cause for alarm, and she is as safe with Don
Juan as with St. Anthony.
These great girls, as middle-aged matrons, are often seen in the
country; and one of the things which most strikes a Londoner is the
abiding youthfulness of this kind of matron. She has a large family,
the elders of which are grown up, but she has lost none of the beauty
for which her youth was noted, though it is now a different kind of
beauty from what it was then; and she has still the air and manners of
a girl. She blushes easily, is shy, and sometimes apt to be a little
awkward, though always sweet and gentle; she knows very little of real
life and less of its vices; she is pitiful to sorrow, affectionate to
her friends who are few in number, and strongly attached to her own
family; she has no theological doubts, no scientific proclivities, and
the conditions of society and the family do not perplex her. She
thinks Darwinism and protoplasm dangerous innovations; and the
doctrine of Free Love with Mrs. Cady Staunton's development is
something too shocking for her to talk about. She lifts her calm clear
eyes in wonder at the wild proceedings of the shrieking sisterhood,
and cannot for the life of her make out what all this tumult means,
and what the women want. For herself, she has no doubts whatever, no
moral uncertainties. The path of duty is as plain to her as are the
words of the Bible, and she loves her husband too well to wish to be
his rival or to desire an individualized existence outside his. She is
his wife, she says; and that seems more satisfactory to her than to be
herself a Somebody in the full light of notoriety, with him in the
shade as her appendage.
If inclined to be intolerant to any one, it is to those who seek to
disturb the existing state of things, or whose speculations unsettle
men's minds; those who, as she thinks, entangle the sense of that
which is clear and straightforward enough if they would but leave it
alone, and who, by their love of iconoclasm, run the risk of
destroying more than idols. But she is intolerant only because she
believes that when men put forth false doctrines they put them forth
for a bad purpose, and to do intentional mischief. Had she not this
simple faith, which no philosophic questionings have either enlarged
or disturbed, she would not be the great girl she is; and what she
would have gained in catholicity she would have lost in freshness. For
herself, she has no self-asserting power, and would shrink from any
kind of public action; but she likes to visit the poor, and is
sedulous in the matter of tracts and flannel-petticoats, vexing the
souls of the sterner, if wiser, guardians and magistrates by her
generosity which they affirm only encourages idleness and creates
pauperism. She cannot see it in that light. Charity is one of the
cardinal virtues of Christianity; accordingly, charitable she will
be, in spite of all that political economists may say.
She belongs to her family, they do not belong to her; and you seldom
hear her say 'I went' or 'I did.' It is always 'we;' which, though a
small point, is a significant one, showing how little she holds to
anything like an isolated individuality, and how entirely she feels a
woman's life to belong to and be bound up in her home relations. She
is romantic too, and has her dreams and memories of early days; when
her eyes grow moist as she looks at her husband--the first and only
man she ever loved--and the past seems to be only part of the present.
The experience which she must needs have had has served only to make
her more gentle, more pitiful, than the ordinary girl, who is
naturally inclined to be a little hard; and of all her household she
is the kindest and the most intrinsically sympathetic. She keeps up
her youth for the children's sake she says; and they love her more
like an elder sister than the traditional mother. They never think of
her as old, for she is their constant companion and can do all that
they do. She is fond of exercise; is a good walker; an active climber;
a bold horsewoman; a great promoter of picnics and open-air
amusements. She looks almost as young as her eldest daughter
differentiated by a cap and covered shoulders; and her sons have a
certain playfulness in their love for her which makes them more her
brothers than her sons. Some of them are elderly men before she has
ceased to be a great girl; for she keeps her youth to the last by
virtue of a clear conscience, a pure mind and a loving nature. She is
wise in her generation and takes care of her health by means of active
habits, fresh air, cold water and a sparing use of medicines and
stimulants; and if the dear soul is proud of anything it is of her
figure, which she keeps trim and elastic to the last, and of the
clearness of her complexion, which no heated rooms have soddened, no
accustomed strong waters have clouded nor bloated.
Then there are great girls of another kind--women who, losing the
sweetness of youth, do not get in its stead the dignity of maturity;
who are fretful, impatient, undisciplined, knowing no more of
themselves nor human nature than they did when they were nineteen, yet
retaining nothing of that innocent simplicity, that single-hearted
freshness and joyousness of nature which one does not wish to see
disturbed even for the sake of a deeper knowledge. These are the women
who will not get old and who consequently do not keep young; who, when
they are fifty, dress themselves in gauze and rosebuds, and think to
conceal their years by a judicious use of many paint-pots and the
liberality of the hairdresser; who are jealous of their daughters,
whom they keep back as much and as long as they can, and terribly
aggrieved at their irrepressible six feet of sonship; women who have a
trick of putting up their fans before their faces as if they were
blushing; who give you the impression of flounces and ringlets, and
who flirt by means of much laughter and a long-sustained giggle; who
talk incessantly, yet have said nothing to the purpose when they have
done; and who simper and confess they are not strong-minded but only
'awfully silly little things,' when you try to lead the conversation
into anything graver than fashion and flirting. They are women who
never learn repose of mind nor dignity of manner; who never lose their
taste for mindless amusements, and never acquire one for nature nor
for quiet happiness; and who like to have lovers always hanging about
them--men for the most part younger than themselves, whom they call
naughty boys and tap playfully by way of rebuke. They are women unable
to give young girls good advice on prudence or conduct; mothers who
know nothing of children; mistresses ignorant of the alphabet of
housekeeping; wives whose husbands are merely the bankers, and most
probably the bugbears, of the establishment; women who think it
horrible to get old and to whom, when you talk of spiritual peace or
intellectual pleasures, you are as unintelligible as if you were
discoursing in the Hebrew tongue. As a class they are wonderfully
inept; and their hands are practically useless, save as ring-stands
and glove-stretchers. For they can do nothing with them, not even
frivolous fancy-work. They read only novels; and one of the marvels of
their existence is what they do with themselves in those hours when
they are not dressing, flirting, nor paying visits.
If they are of a querulous and nervous type, their children fly from
them to the furthest corners of the house; if they are molluscous and
good-natured, they let themselves be manipulated up to a certain
point, but always on the understanding that they are only a few years
older than their daughters; almost all these women, by some fatality
peculiar to themselves, having married when they were about ten years
old, and having given birth to progeny with the uncomfortable property
of looking at the least half a dozen years older than they are. This
accounts for the phenomenon of a girlish matron of this kind, dressed
to represent first youth, with a sturdy black-browed débutante by her
side, looking, you would swear to it, of full majority if a day. Her
only chance is to get that black-browed tell-tale married out of hand;
and this is the reason why so many daughters of great girls of this
type make such notoriously early--and bad--matches; and why, when once
married, they are never seen in society again.
Grandmaternity and girlishness scarcely fit in well together, and
rosebuds are a little out of place when a nursery of the second degree
is established. There are scores of women fluttering through society
at this moment whose elder daughters have been socially burked by the
friendly agency of a marriage almost as soon as, or even before, they
were introduced, and who are therefore, no longer witnesses against
the hairdresser and the paint-pots; and there are scores of these
same marriageable daughters eating out their hearts and spoiling their
pretty faces in the school-room a couple of years beyond their time,
that mamma may still believe the world takes her to be under thirty
yet--and young at that.
_SHUNTED DOWAGERS._
The typical mother-in-law is, as we all know, fair game for every
one's satire; and according to the odd notions which prevail on
certain points, a man is assumed to show his love for his wife by
systematic disrespect to her mother, and to think that her new
affections will be knit all the closer the more loosely he can induce
her to hold her old ones. The mother-in-law, according to this view of
things, has every fault. She interferes, and always at the wrong time
and on the wrong side; she makes a tiff into a quarrel and widens a
coolness into a breach; she is self-opinionated and does not go with
the times; she treats her daughter like a child and her son-in-law
like an appendage; she spoils the elder children and feeds the baby
with injudicious generosity; she spends too much on her dress,
wears too many rings, trumps her partner's best card and does not
attend to the 'call;'--and she is fat. But even the well abused
mother-in-law--the portly old dowager who has had her day and is no
longer pleasing in the eyes of men--even she has her wrongs like most
of us; and if she sometimes asserts her rights more aggressively than
patiently, she has to put up with many disagreeable rubs for her own
part; and female tempers over fifty are not notorious for humility.
Take the case of a widow with means, whose family is settled. Not a
daughter to chaperone, not a son to marry; all are so far happily off
her hands, and she is left alone. But what does her loneliness mean?
In the first place, while her grief for her husband is yet new--and we
will assume that she does grieve for him--she has to turn out of the
house where she has been queen and mistress for the best years of her
life; to abdicate state and style in favour of her son and her son's
wife whom she is sure not to like; and, however good her jointure may
be, she must necessarily find her new home one of second-rate
importance. Perhaps however, the family objects to her having a home
of her own. Dear mamma must give up housekeeping and divide her time
among them all; but specially among her daughters, being more likely
to get on well with their husbands than with her sons' wives.