[Illustration: MODERN DAUGHTERS]
Books by Alexander Black.
MODERN DAUGHTERS.
CONVERSATIONS WITH VARIOUS AMERICAN GIRLS AND ONE MAN. Fully illustrated
from Photographs taken by the Author. 8vo. $2.50.
MISS AMERICA.
PEN AND CAMERA SKETCHES OF THE AMERICAN GIRL. With 75 illustrations. 8vo.
$2.50.
A CAPITAL COURTSHIP.
ILLUSTRATED FROM THE AUTHOR’S CAMERA. 12mo. $1.00.
MISS JERRY.
A LOVE STORY. Illustrated from the Author’s Camera. _New Edition._ 12mo.
$1.00.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
_Modern Daughters_
CONVERSATIONS WITH VARIOUS
AMERICAN GIRLS AND ONE MAN
BY
ALEXANDER BLACK
_Author of “Miss America,” “Miss Jerry,” etc._
_WITH DESIGNS AND PHOTOGRAPHIC
ILLUSTRATIONS
BY THE AUTHOR_
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK · _M DCCC XC IX_
_Copyright, 1899, by_
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
_All rights reserved_
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
TO
_GERALDINE AND CHRISTINE BROOKS_
[Illustration]
A NOTE
_Which you, fair, friendly, discriminating reader (as the case may be),
will please regard as properly folded, unsealed (having in mind the
courteous delivery by the publisher), and running somewhat in this wise:_
_Begging your pardon for passing between you and the text proper, this
is to say that if anything I have reported or confessed offends your
sense of propriety, you are to read the offending passage a second time,
whereupon you surely will discover evidences of an authorial humility
incompatible with real irreverence. And if this apology sounds trite and
lame, bear in mind that prefaces are written last, when a man (as when he
has just parted from one of you) is completely quelled by a thought of
the good things he might, or at least should, have said._
_As for the pictorial obligato, if it shall occasionally show a curious
indifference to the tune of the text, I trust that it may appear upon
consideration that there are some very good reasons why this partnership
should be as indefinite as it is._
_And since you, reader, will in so many instances find yourself looking
at your counterfeit presentment, I may, I hope, be allowed in this place
to say this word of grateful acknowledgment to all of those daughters of
the States who have permitted my camera to save my pen the impossible
task of describing the beauty of the American girl._
_A. B._
[Illustration]
_Contents_
I. WITH A DÉBUTANTE _Page_ 1
II. WITH A LEFT-OVER GIRL 21
III. WITH A GYM GIRL 43
IV. WITH A HEROINE 65
V. WITH A CLUBWOMAN 89
VI. WITH A CYNIC 113
VII. WITH A CHAPERON 135
VIII. WITH A NICE MAN 157
IX. WITH AN ENGAGED GIRL 177
X. WITH A BRIDE 195
[Illustration]
I
WITH A DÉBUTANTE
[Illustration]
“And so,” I said, “you are to come out.”
She was not the girl I took in to dinner, a circumstance which invested
her with a perverted interest. It often is so. The fact might remind us
of the wider paradox—the fascination of the people in whom we shouldn’t
be interested. I have noticed the same thing in the matter of duties,
even of agreeable duties. When I have a book to write, I always can think
of the most beautiful things for the book that I am to write next after
that.
I tried to express something of this idea to her while the man who
brought her in was talking to a charming lady on his left.
“As a means of justifying yourself,” she said, “I should find your
philosophy needlessly circuitous. I hate justifications.”
“Now don’t,” I pleaded, “don’t upset my theory that every one—even a
woman—prefers to be justified, is justified, in his (I wish we had taken
up that new pronoun _thon’s_) own sight before doing anything.”
“How stupid! Can’t you see that your justification takes all the fun for
me out of your conversation? Now, if you couldn’t justify yourself there
would be something in it.”
“But I haven’t said that I do.”
“O I can feel it! You have a justified tone.”
“What an infliction!” I moaned. “A justified tone must be worse than a
sanctified one. Isn’t it enough that I simply can’t help talking to you?”
“Certainly not. If you weren’t immersed in theories you would know that
to a woman nothing could ever be _enough_.”
“It sometimes seems so,” I assented. “You might have reminded me of that.”
“Evidently you are meditating a cynicism. I can hear the rumble of it in
the distance.”
“No,” I said, “cynicisms do not rumble. That is profundity. I was going
to say, when you did riot interrupt me, that you typify for me the spirit
of the insatiable in the modern young woman.”
“And we are at a dinner, too,” she returned severely. “Your profundities
are very rude.”
“As for that, an appetite has ceased to be awkward. It is very pleasant
to think that a girl and gastronomy are no longer incongruous.”
“So nice of you to let us eat.”
“My dear, the era not only permits you to eat, but insists on your
eating, and dotes on the spectacle. The American girl is not a
disembodied sentiment. She is a splendid physical fact. But that is
another matter. The interesting thing for me at the moment is the news
that you are coming out. Let us talk about that.”
[Illustration]
“An absurd topic. I can’t see anything interesting in that.”
“Which proves that you are insatiable. What could be more interesting?”
“O, it is interesting enough to me as a fact. It will be a comfort in
some ways. But what is there to say of it? I am tired of not being out.
Aunt Madeleine is tired of my not being out. So is papa.”
“Well,” I said, “I can see that it would be something to get off your
mind.”
“O, it will be an immense relief, I can assure you. Not that I think
there is anything in it. But it is something that one has to endure. I
suspect that you regard it as something of a joke.”
“On the contrary, I regard it as an event of almost religious
significance. If you would permit me to be sentimental I could say some
rather pretty things about Coming Out as an institution. Débutanting is
one of those incidents of civilized life which we all permit ourselves to
contemplate with real enjoyment. I’m sure that your aunt will enjoy it.”
“But?—”
“I didn’t say ‘but’.”
“You looked it. There was a lurking ‘but’ in your tone, like the
diminished seventh. But what?”
“I refuse to have a ‘but’ if I am to be challenged for it. A ‘but’ is
sometimes a fragile thing.”
“Yes, and sometimes it is a buttress.”
“Not one that may not be shattered by a woman—even a very young woman.”
“You are intolerable.”
“And you are inquisitive—I mean acquisitive. And you know too much
already.”
“Did that have anything to do with the ‘but?’”
“What?”
“That I know too much already?”
Perhaps I should have had to confess had not the lady whom I did take in
to dinner demanded my attention at the moment. Presently the Débutante
was saying: “Did you go to the Charity Ball?”
“Now you are having fun with me. Do I look like a charity baller?”
[Illustration]
“Don’t sneer at the poor old Charity. It’s antique and has a grand
march, but it’s a dear old affair.”
“I am not sneering. I never go to formidable dances. Now why did you ask
me? Did you go?”
“No. I did last year. Aunt Madeleine has gone regularly for ten or
fifteen years—and worn the same shade of velvet every time. This year I
should have gone with her again, but Aunt Madeleine said it was too near
my coming out.”
“I understand. That seems reasonable, too. Unless you were kept in a
little I don’t see how you _could_ come out.”
“I shouldn’t be here if I hadn’t promised Mrs. Amering in Paris that I
would come. Aunt Madeleine was there and abetted me because she wanted to
be nice to Mrs. Amering.”
“I fancy that your aunt is very good to you.”
[Illustration]
“O, Aunt Madeleine is a dear. But she is a trying paradox. You see, she
wants to bring me up—and out—properly. But she likes to play at being
radical, and sometimes I have to remind her that she is too reckless with
me. She has spasms of conservative severity that really are very funny.
Then her rigor relents and she takes it to heart if I don’t do something
rampant. When she is in this mood she packs me off somewhere by myself.
‘You have too much of me,’ she says. That was how I came to go out on
the Texas ranch last year. Uncle Billy Sandrix had expected both of us
to come, and you should have seen him stare when I rode up to the ranch
house on a crazy Indian pony, a week before he was to come and meet us
at Fort Worth. ‘What the devil,’ he said,—and that was all that he could
say. I had a refulgent time there. The next evening, while Uncle Billy
was telling me about one of his horses, a young fellow rode up and asked
if he might stop there. Uncle Billy said ‘Certainly.’ That was just like
Uncle Billy. The young man stabled his horse, and coming over to Uncle
Billy, asked, ‘Where shall I sleep?’ Something in the way he said it
must have riled Uncle Billy, or a broad English accent may have struck
his funny side. Anyway, he said, ‘Why, I don’t care. This pasture has
only twenty thousand acres. It’s the smallest in the outfit, but you are
welcome to sleeping room anywhere.’ This was just like Uncle Billy, too.
The young man nodded and turned away; and we both thought he had been
seriously offended. Presently Uncle Billy went out to look for him. But
he was not to be seen. The next morning we found that the stranger had
slept in the open, had harnessed at daylight and ridden away, leaving his
thanks with one of the men. This hurt Uncle Billy and he tore after the
stranger, ran him down in an hour, trotted him back, told him he had lots
of sand, and wouldn’t let him go for two weeks. It turned out that the
young man was the son of an English peer, who had run away from home. He
didn’t tell me that until the end of the second week.”
“Yes; I daresay that at the end of the second week he was telling you
everything.”
“Well, he was a lovely fellow, and really a very good rider for an
Englishman. Even Uncle Billy liked his riding. I met him afterward in
London, and he was very nice. It was delicious to hear him give me
advice.”
“Advice?”
“Yes; he talked to me like a father and I laughed at him like a sister.
It actually grieved him when I sometimes went out alone. You see, I
couldn’t always make Aunt Madeleine go with me. It worried him that I
didn’t like his clothes. They simply didn’t fit and I said so. Then he
patiently outlined his theory that it was bad art to have the clothes
follow the figure. The American, he thought, dressed too timidly. The
effect of the American’s clothes was too sweet. ‘A man should look
superior to his clothes,’ he maintained. ‘And so,’ I said, ‘you have
inferior clothes. How can a man better indicate his superiority to his
clothes, how can he better dominate them, than by making them fit him?’ a
remark which seemed to convince him that I was hopeless. At all events,
he confessed that he’d never before had a girl find fault with his
clothes.”
“I can fancy his being cut up about it. Do you do that sort of thing
often?”
“If you mean find fault with a man’s clothes, no; if you mean tease a man
for being too serious, yes.”
“I see; you are serious only when the man isn’t. Tell me: how do you find
men in the average,—too serious?”
“At the wrong time—yes.”
“When you are older, my dear, you will find them less serious.”
“Which will prove what I say, that they are serious at the wrong time.
Why should they be serious with me?”
“To be candid, it is all I can do to remain flippant enough.”
“That is brutal.”
[Illustration]
“You inspire me with the most serious thoughts.”
“That sounds like the charming curé I met in Provence. We had a
delightful time at a country house, a romantic old vine-covered place
where everybody you met was a character out of Balzac—when he is nice—or
out of Daudet anywhere. Of course there had to be a curé, and he struck
me like some book curé brought up to date. My, but he was handsome! with
a romantic splash of gray at the temples. Why, a woman would tell her age
to such a confessor! He knew a great deal about America. What he didn’t
know he wanted me to tell him.”
“I hope you completed his knowledge.”
“He asked me if all American girls knew so much. I said that most of
them knew much more; that I was an ignoramus who had been educated
in three countries; who learned things to please her aunt and forgot
them to please her father. It was funny to see how puzzled he was.
First he was amiably gallant with me. Then he grew interrogatory, then
sage. ‘My child,’ he said (it sounded just like a book), ‘you seem to
have anticipated life.’ What do you suppose he was driving at? Then
he went on, with a sort of grieved look, ‘You know too much.’ ‘And is
this my reward,’ I demanded, ‘for being so good and answering all your
questions?’ He laughed then, showing the loveliest teeth you ever saw. ‘I
did not expect such answers,’ he said. When I told him afterward that we
were going to Monte Carlo and then to the Grand Prix (papa was with us),
he looked at me as if he was wondering what I would do with them.”
“Did you go to Monte Carlo?”
[Illustration]
“Yes; but I didn’t think much of the game. I liked the little game at
San Antonio better, though Aunt Madeleine made only a weak protest at
Monaco, after raising a great row in Texas. And it was the same way about
slumming. Aunt Madeleine thought it was quite romantic in Naples, but
was completely depressed at the vulgarity of going to Pell Street. Papa
doesn’t care particularly to have me go unless he takes me himself; and
he is more logical. He says that all slums smell alike to him. Do you
know that very unexpectedly I had a good time at Mentone. Think of it!
The very name sounds drowsy. Nobody ever cuts up at Mentone. I could
only think of ‘Ordered South’ and so on. But there was a count there—a
Count de—de—I forget now; it was an impossible name anyway; and he was so
funny. He was more than serious. He was gloomy. He was more than gloomy.
He was Gloom. You should have seen him! I shouldn’t have missed him for
anything. He was prodigious—and so stunning looking.”
“You must have had a very good time.”
“I did. But you can’t imagine what luck I fell into; for there was a
Pittsburg girl there, a Miss Gruge, who was—well, she had been ticketed
for a title and a lot of money. Then her folks decided to let her go
for a title without money, then for money related to a title. And they
have kept on marking the poor thing down. You know how it will be. At
some special sale she will go for away below cost. It is pitiful. And
this Marked Down Girl and her mother simply bothered the Count to death.
The more they pestered him the gloomier the Count got with me. I was
afraid to cheer him up; it would have ended everything, and the fun of
riling Miss Gruge and her mother was too good. Well, one day when Aunt
Madeleine had a headache he blurted out a proposal. ‘My dear Count,’ I
said, ‘how absurd! Can’t you see that I am only a child? Why, I am not
even in society. I’m not to be considered at all. For Heaven’s sake don’t
let papa hear of this!’ As you might suppose, this made the Count even
gloomier than ever. O, I hated to leave him!”
“I’m afraid you are a trifle cruel.”
“It isn’t cruelty; it’s a sense of humor.”
“You will be punished some day when you meet the man who has the right
sense of humor. Perhaps he will have a dash of romantic gray, and fine
teeth, and be maddeningly unserious—”
“O, I have met him already!”
“Indeed?”
[Illustration]
“At Washington. Papa had some legislative business there. The only way to
get the thing through was to camp there, he said, and we camped there for
a whole winter. I was afraid at first that it was going to be wretchedly
dull. And it was, for a few weeks, until papa got his bearings, for
meanwhile Aunt Madeleine had started to live up to her theory that if
you got into the House set first your chances for the Senate and Cabinet
sets were nothing at all. One afternoon at Mrs. Senator Pritter’s, I met
an army man who is just the sort you have been threatening me with. Of
course he only pretended to be unserious, but I gave him the credit of
the pretence. One of the women had whispered to me that the ring was
going to defeat him for a promotion. When I asked him what the ring had
against him, he was almost serious for a moment, and to tell you the
truth, I almost liked him that way. ‘Who told you about the ring?’ he
asked me. ‘My sources of information cannot be divulged,’ I said. ‘But
why don’t you get it anyhow?’ He shook his head. ‘Let us talk about
the weather.’ I wouldn’t let him off that way. ‘I like fighters,’ I
persisted. ‘Why don’t you get everybody to work for you? Isn’t that the
way it’s done?’ ‘Will you work for me?’ he asked. ‘You’re laughing at
me,’ I said, ‘but I will work for you.’ Now you will laugh too, but I got
eight senators to speak to the President about the Lieutenant, and he was
promoted after all. When I saw him again, he was dreadfully serious, and
made a great mess of thanking me. Afterward he wrote me a nice letter
from Manila. All that got me quite interested in Washington.”
“Washington is quite an entertaining game—when you win.”
“I don’t ask to win always—if I like the game. It’s only in games I don’t
like that I insist on winning.... What are you so quiet about?”
“I was thinking ... how nice it was that you were coming out.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“My dear, don’t flutter forth into this too-serious world in a
distrustful mood.”
“I never have moods; I only have tenses.”
“And it is mostly the present tense. And yet you surely have begun to
think about the future.”
“In another minute you will be giving me advice.”
“No; not exactly that, though I might ask yours.... Why, here’s the
coffee!”
“When shall it be?... When shall you ask?”
“After you have come out.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
II
WITH A LEFT-OVER GIRL
[Illustration]
She had said that she did not care to play that afternoon, and the young
man went away with a disappointed look. There had been one or two young
men near her most of the time that day. Now she was alone. She sat in
a shaded part of the hotel veranda. In her lap was an open book, face
down. As I drew near I saw that the book was covered with a fragment of
unlettered paper, a circumstance which left to merely ocular dexterity no
chance of knowing what she was reading.
“My dear,” I said in a sort of paternal way, designed to palliate the
effect of an intrusion, “for a moment I was tempted to think that you
preferred a book to a man; but since you are not ardently reading I am
giving myself so much of the benefit of the doubt as to take this chair
beside you, and to remark that you cannot expect to escape the common
danger of being talked to even if you do not care to play.”
“You are very welcome. Talking is a game, too, isn’t it? We are supposed
always to be ready to play that.”
“Nevertheless, perhaps I should ask you first, as the young man did just
now about the other game, whether you really are willing. You might
choose to go on with the book, and I could study the scenery.”
“This game has begun already. As for the book, I came to a stupid
place,—a lot of description.”
“You know,” I said, “a man finds a certain justification for talking
to a woman in the fact recently exploited by science, that woman does
not talk to herself. While they still urge that it is not good for man
to be alone, man seems to have invented one means of getting on alone
that is denied to women; for if he can talk to himself he has acquired a
singularly useful safety valve.”
“I am sure it is very nice of you, when you could talk to yourself, to
waste words on me. I hope there isn’t anything in this new theory that
may prove that man _must_ talk. It would be upsetting, you know. Perhaps
it isn’t true that women never talk to themselves. I don’t believe that I
ever talk to myself, but I don’t have to. There is always somebody about.
And I really never have anything left to say to myself.”
“I think I should prefer to have you take me for granted,” I said. “It
would spoil your effect if you were either grateful or resentful. After
all, these scientific generalizations are distressingly misleading. Take
that recent statement that baldness is a safeguard against insanity.
Some of the hair-restorer advertisements do not seem to indicate a faith
in the entire sanity of the bald. Yet it is a benevolent theory. No one
would voluntarily lose his hair for the certainty of not losing his
reason, but the bald may derive some real solace from the invention.
Doubtless many of life’s most comforting assurances have no better
foundation.”
“Are you in that mood?”
“I am rebuked for my platitude.”
“In the talk game platitudes are very safe, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps they are; and in most games simply being safe naturally occupies
much of the time. Yet in the talk game it can’t be fair to catch one’s
breath with a platitude too often—not unless one wishes to be thrown back
upon solitaire.”
“Solitaire is an excellent game. I think it is much underrated.”
“It is very safe, too.”
“Yes, and it is unquarrelsome. It never breaks friendships.”
“I can’t imagine you quarrelling in a game,” I ventured to say.
“Perhaps that is because I know with whom to play,—and which games to
keep out of.”
“Do you know that it would be a great relief, if not a real comfort, to a
man in certain circumstances if he could know just when a woman was out
of the game? His perplexity in the matter of the greatest game of all,
when he does not know whether she really is playing or only is loitering
about with the players, sometimes is one of the most distressing
spectacles in life.”
[Illustration]
“It seems to me,” said the Left-Over Girl, with a little shrug, “that he
generally should be able to tell whether she is playing or not. As for
knowing whether she ever is going to play any more, that seems to me like
more knowledge than he is entitled to.”
“Possibly; but as I have suggested, it would save much time and many
doubts, if nothing more,—reduce the sum of popular skepticism. And even
the spectator, who is not presumed to be in the way of playing, might
have a simple human curiosity in the matter.”
[Illustration]
“Oh, the spectator always has curiosity, and the spectator is an element
to be counted, too; there are so many of them, and they influence the
players in one way or another so much. But I don’t think the spectators
have any more right than the players to know when any one in particular
is out of the game for good.”
“As for that, I much doubt whether any one is to be counted as out of the
game for good. I heard yesterday of a Miss Nottingby who has just been
married at the age of eighty-three. One never can tell. But that is not
the point. It is the attitude of mind that counts. That a woman should
think that she is out of the game, or have decided definitely that she
will not play any more, must be of great importance even when the fact is
not known, as we must suppose generally happens. My point is that if the
facts were more generally known various beneficent results might accrue.”
“To whom?”
“To all of us, including the seceders. The uncertainty breeds cynicism.
Of course I know that there is something piquing about the mystery
surrounding the motives of the unmarried, especially the motives of the
unmarried woman. But although this is so entertaining in itself, although
the new old maid is the most cheerful, the most useful, and the most
fascinating sphinx of the century, I feel at times as if there may be
something disintegrating in her complacence and in the complacence of
society regarding her.”
[Illustration]
“How good it is of you to be so altruistically grieved!”
“Why don’t you ask me why I am saying this to you?”
“Because I know, and because it is so much more amusing to have you say
it unassisted.”
“Now, do you know that I should have expected to find you superior to a
proclivity so purely feminine as that. To make him say things unassisted!
From the dawn of time woman has delighted to do that.”
There was a haze of thought in her eyes. “I dare say you never have
stopped to think that when he is assisted he says so much more than he
means.”
“I thought you were going to say, ‘than he ought to.’”
“The greater includes the less. When he says a little that he doesn’t
mean he says a great deal more than he ought to.”
“Perhaps he always will say much that he shouldn’t, anyway. But admitting
that you have the right to mystify him, and then not to help him, does it
seem to you precisely fair that girls who neither go into the marrying
game, nor stay out of it, should—”
“Flirt as much as they do—I want to save you the trouble of finding an
inoffensive phrase.”
“Perhaps I wasn’t going to be inoffensive. And I might not have chosen
the word ‘flirt.’ Flirt doesn’t exactly express the idea. I shouldn’t
wish to seem as if I were hunting about for a new title for an old
crime,—”
“Crime? You will be quite solemn in a moment. Did you come over here to
scold me?”
“I thought this was a talk game. A talk game couldn’t have a motive,
could it?”
“Why, yes. It is like a Wagnerian composition. We might have encountered
the Didactic Motive.”
“Now you are scolding me. I insist that I am merely the Interested
Spectator. Maybe I am a sort of Walking Gentleman in the cast, who, with
every wish not to be impertinent, ventures a timid and respectful word
with the leading lady in the wings.”
“Should you think the Walking Gentleman had a right to quarrel with the
leading lady as to her method of reading the lines?”
“No; but surely he might ask her, humbly, and in a spirit of honest
inquiry, what she thought the author meant and whether, to her, the play
seemed consistent. Even the Walking Gentleman must be presumed to have
certain human impulses. Perhaps he can’t even find out who is the leading
lady. Perhaps the girl who seems designed by nature to be the heroine,
the girl who, if he were the Hero and not the Walking Gentleman, would
make his duty clear, betrays a singular indifference to the Hero, the
Hero’s understudy, and all the rest of them.”
“Then you have come over here with a view to classifying me?”
“Suppose I had so definite a hope?”
“I might help you.”
“What are you, please?”
“I am the Left-Over Girl.”
“I don’t wish to be ungracious, but that does not help me much. Who or
what has left you over?”
[Illustration]
“Circumstances. In the course of the great readjustment I am left out,
lost in the shuffle, if you like.” This idea seemed to please her.
“Marriage is like any other game, isn’t it? He calls her bluff—”
“Don’t!” I protested. “These card game allusions perplex me as much as
the paradox which I have encountered in my travels this year, that poker
is popular in New England and dominoes in Texas.”
“But somebody told me that they play a very wicked kind of dominoes
in Texas, and I know that they play a very moral kind of poker in New
England.”
“I am afraid you play poker.”
“Like Mistress Muslin, I love cards. And you know there are some people
who never have good hands. Doesn’t that prove that the word ‘chance’ has
a deep and dark meaning? There is fate behind chance. I never had a good
hand but once.”
“In which game?”
“Oh, in the card game. And I didn’t win, for the old reason—my partner
was so stupid. I could have withered him. But he was an unwitherable man.”
“I wish that you would tell me something more about this left-over
situation. Not that I think you can know very much about it yet.
You cannot have been left over very long, and asking you about your
left-overness may be almost as premature as intercepting the newly
arrived European traveller in New York Bay and asking him how he likes
America.”
“I suppose you wish to ask me how it feels to be left over.”
“No, I haven’t got so far as that. As you have taken part, as it were,
in the circumstances which have left you over, I should like to find out
if I could, that is to say, if you felt that you could tell me, which
qualities in you tended to bring about this result. I feel quite certain
that you are not a born old maid. The born old maid is one of nature’s
whimsicalities that are not hard to read. Even when she is married, one
may easily recognize her. What interests me is the subtle differentiation
in those among the unmarried who never will be old maids, which has
produced their left-overness. For the life of me I can’t see why you
should be left over, either subjectively or objectively. Is it a gnawing
prejudice, or a sense of humor, that has made you leave yourself over?”
“Might not those things characterize an old maid?”
“They might, but an old maid would be an old maid without regard to
the possession of any such particular qualities. The old maid instinct
is another matter. We are talking now about this different and evolved
modern tendency.”
“Suppose I were to say that marriage simply is not in my line. What
should you say that that indicated? Might not an old maid say that?”
“She might say it and she does say it, which may indicate how indefinite
it is. In the interest of social science I really should like to know
what you think you mean by that. Of course questions upon so serious a
matter necessarily seem a trifle brutal.”
“Don’t apologize, Mr. Scientist. I suspect that the trouble with me is
that I can’t get up a personal interest in marriage. I have no prejudice
against it as an institution, or as a—state of mind. I am not even
single because I am cautious. No one has preached to me the philosophy
of disenchantment. I know married people who are happy, and single
people who are unhappy. I have seen the tall girl and the short man, and
the tall man and the short girl, illustrate the splendid paradoxes of
pairing. I believe that marriage is just as good and just as bad as the
people who illustrate it. But I haven’t been able to get up any personal
interest in it, any more than I have been able to get up a personal
interest in the law or medicine. After all, marriage is a career. I don’t
hate the Church because I do not feel called to preach. Yet I don’t feel
that I have the least instinctive aversion to marriage. Do you suppose
that if I were a born old maid I should be conscious of the instinctive
removal?”
[Illustration]
“Probably not. Do you hear that music in the hotel parlor that has
supplied a plaintive accompaniment to our talk?”
“That is Miss—hush! If ever there was an old maid born—”
“Yes, and that woman has dreamed of marriage from her girlhood. Wasn’t
it Charles Lamb who said with regard to music that he was sentimentally
disposed to harmony but applicably was incapable of a tune? Poetry and
the old maid instinct have battled in that woman for forty years. But
we are slipping from science into gossip. Shouldn’t she answer your
question?”
[Illustration]
“I don’t know. Who can say that she isn’t conscious of the instinct? Lamb
knew that he couldn’t actually make a tune. It was Lamb, wasn’t it, who
tried all his life to like Scotsmen? And when he gave up at the end he
was so sweet about it. He couldn’t like them, but he didn’t have a bit
of additional resentment because he had failed. Some people hate—with
interest from the date of prejudice. Now I have been trying for—quite a
few years to like marriage,—personally, you know,—and if I fail I don’t
expect to place any interest charges against the institution.”
“And on the other hand, if you succeed, you mustn’t expect marriage to
pay you too heavily on the investment.”
“I’m afraid I should be more likely to do that than the other. I suppose
that shows that I am not a philosopher. If I ever marry—but how
ridiculous that sounds! You would think I was talking about—any other
career.”
“Oh, if I were selling stock in matrimony, I should consider you quite
a hopeful case. But I’ll wager that many another man has thought the
same thing. And naturally you have not been seriously conscious of the
phases of yourself that have made you seem like a hopeful case to them.
I was reading the other day in a new Franklin biography an advertisement
written by Franklin and appearing in his paper. It concerned certain
missing books of his, and was headed: ‘Lent and Forgot to Whom,’ Ah! my
dear, it is so with many of you women: you lend and forget to whom. But
the men—”
“What a dreadfully unfortunate analogy! If they keep that which does not
belong to them, am I to blame? And how can a girl try to like matrimony
without trying to like men? I ought not to be feminine enough to remind
you that men have been known to ‘forget to whom.’ Do you see that young
fellow coming up the path with the girl in white duck? You see what an
adroit, hovering style he has? I know just the sort of thing he is saying
to that white duckling. He is one of the men who forget to whom. He is a
Cynic-Maker.”
We watched them silently as they sauntered up the path.
[Illustration]
“Yes,” I said, “that is the way the great tangle begins. A nice girl
meets your Cynic-Maker, finds that he forgets to whom, from which she
concludes that all men are a mockery. Then some honest young fellow
meets her, revolts at her crude, newly fledged cynicism, which an older
or a less honest man might have penetrated in a moment, decides that all
women are depraved, and there you are with all the elements of a social
tragedy. We may say that the arch-mischief-maker is the man who creates
the cynic; yet we should, perhaps, inquire whether any new conditions are
producing him.”
“He is as old as lying,” she said quietly, her eyes following him up the
steps.
“The one comfort,” I added, “is that he probably does not succeed in
making cynics so easily as in an earlier state of society.”
“You mean that girls are more skeptical?”
“I mean that girls have more freedom, more experience, more information,
more opportunities for comparison, and that the Cynic-Maker, to succeed,
has to be vastly cleverer than he used to be.”
“I believe I shall join you in that optimism, though I am inclined to
think that by an operation of natural selection he is vastly cleverer
than he used to be.”
The Cynic-Maker sat down beside the white duckling at the other end of
the veranda.
“Witness,” I said, “the grotesque appositions of life: The Cynic-Maker
and the Victim at one end of the stage, and the Spectator with the
Left-Over Girl at the Other. Surely we have here some very important
elements of a social allegory.”
“And in spite of everything,” mused the Left-Over Girl, “I was going to
say just now that I thought marriage was more popular than ever.”
“What makes you think that—I mean in view of the statistics, in view of
the census of the unmarried?”
“You must not insist upon participation only as indicating popularity.
Take the instance of golf, which few people actually play, but which is
_the_ game all the same. I mean that in proportion to the number who do
not marry there is less affirmative objection to marriage than in the
past.”
“I wish I knew how you make that out. But I am going to take this much
from it, and you will correct me if I am wrong: Women are less likely to
marry than formerly; but they are also less certain not to marry.”
“Would it cheer you any to believe that?”
“I do not insist upon being cheered. But I should like to know. I am
weak enough to want to be confirmed in a belief which I have tried to
formulate. You can see that matrimony might get some comfort out of it
just as golf does. It might enjoy the flattery of being the greatest game
even if every one doesn’t choose to play, even if certain charming women
do choose to cover their emotions with a veil of sophistry as they cover
their books with brown paper.”
“And thou, Brutus!—after I had lifted the veil! I am very magnanimous.
I play a talk game with you, and let you ask me impossible questions,
label myself for you, uncover my dearest theories, deal mercifully with
your syllogizing, and now I agree to your formula,—yes, and I take off my
brown paper. What more could mortal woman do?”
[Illustration]
“Nothing more,” I said, staring at the lettering on the book, “nothing
more, except tell me why on earth you are reading ‘Emma’?”
She gave a little chuckle and shook her head. “That,” she said, “is the
one thing you have asked that I can not answer.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
III
WITH A GYM GIRL
[Illustration]
There had been some mistake about the time, and she was there an hour
ahead of the class, a circumstance which I had not the conscience to
resent, for she said I might stay until the class came. Meanwhile we sat
in the big, cool gymnasium, into which fell patches of spring sunlight
that painted here the shining floor, and there striped the dangling lines
of rope, falling finally into whimsical arabesques on the dumb-bell
rack. It was a co-educational sort of gymnasium, as one might guess from
the punching-bag and other devices, classes of men and women, boys and
girls, alternating in possession, under the discipline of an academy.
She herself wore a dark serge gym suit, that fascinating hybrid of
skirt and bloomer, which unites the charm of drapery with the effect
of the girded uniform. Sitting there thus well-dressed, lithe, poised,
sufficient, with light in her eyes and blood in her lips, she presented
a pleasing spectacle. Something in her association with all the
paraphernalia of the vaulted gymnasium struck me as symbolizing the
situation of her sex in the modern world. She seemed only prophetically
adjusted to it all, and yet one could not but have the feeling that she
would always know just what to leave alone.
For some reason that did not appear at the moment, she was not merely
the feminine version of the athlete. She was something differing from
that, doubtless something better. I could not think of her as promoting
athletics. The athletics seemed to be promoting her. The ultimate thing
was not a system, a day, an hour, an event. The ultimate thing was
herself. The theory of athletics from a man’s viewpoint is a pretty
affair, and unquestionably it includes the notion of a finer physical
manhood for us all, directly in the participants, by reflection in the
rest of us. Even football, the _reductio ad absurdum_ of inter-personal
conflict, is presumed and I believe reasonably, to have a tonic influence
on the physical development of the race, although there is no country in
the world where, in the habit of daily life, it is more unsafe than in
this for one man to shoulder another. But in feminine athletics so far as
these have gone, there yet appears much less of the idea of prospective
conflict. It may be that this is to come again later. A bunch of girls in
a hand-ball game introduces a lively element of organized contest. But it
scarcely looks as if the girl runner of the Greek games was likely to be
repeated.
[Illustration]
“I suppose you think all this is very absurd,” said the Gym Girl, tapping
the floor with her slipper. “Sometimes I myself think it is. But I like
it; I like it well enough not to care what any one thinks, and besides, I
am supported by the moments when I think it isn’t a bit absurd.”
“Which moment is this?”
“I should find it hard to say. Until I know what you think about it, I
feel defensive about the gym. Generally speaking, I feel rather cordial
toward it to-day.”
“Then please feel cordial toward me, too, for I like the gym and the idea
the gym represents.”
“What idea does the gym represent?” she asked in a tone of challenge.
“Now that is scarcely hospitable. Moreover, I had saved up that to ask
you. But I don’t mind committing myself, with the understanding that
you are to supplement me in the matter. This gymnasium seems to me to
stand for the idea of physical equilibrium. It means that you and the
others are not willing to give up what the city seeks to force you to
give up for the time. In the country I hope you lead such a life that the
gymnasium would be absurd there. But in the city it is very different
for all of us, but especially for you women. The clothes you usually
wear here presuppose that you will suspend, while wearing them, the use
or development of most of your muscles. Some of the time you will wear
a bicycle skirt and ride a wheel. But the bicycle uses but one set of
muscles. Your walking and dancing, with some tennis and an occasional
run out to the links for golf, all leave the symmetrical development
incomplete in some way. They do not include the immensely important
element of climbing, for example. The gymnasium ought to fill in the
chinks. I suppose it does. Then it makes you like it. Perhaps that is one
of the best things it does.”
“It does make me like it, because it makes me like myself. The gymnasium
makes me feel good,—_good_, do you understand, not merely _well_.”
“We often have been told that if we all were well we all should be good.”
[Illustration]
“I don’t suppose I am good enough to hurt, but it is nice to feel that
way. Mind you, I don’t agree at all that women need the gymnasium any
more than men do. I have three brothers, and I know some things. I know
that the average man is just as much hampered by his clothes as the
average woman. I really think he is hampered more, for he defers to his
clothes more than a woman defers to hers. A woman’s management of her
skirt at least gives her a certain amount of exercise, while a man’s
horror of bagging his trousers at the knees has not a single physical
compensation. It simply limits his movements.”
“But a woman’s skirt limits her movements.”
“I wouldn’t say that it limited them so much as it directed them.”
“Perhaps you will tell me why most women are or seem to be pigeon toed.”
“I can explain that. It is for the same reason that they waddle when they
go up stairs. The reason is the skirt. I can illustrate by a diagram,”
and she found a hoople and placed it on the floor. “That we shall say
is Figure One. Now, I place here two dumb-bells. These we shall say are
feet standing within the radius of the skirt. Now the point of freest
action in stepping for the feet B and C obviously lies in the direction
of A. Toward A the foot B can move in the longest line without striking
the skirt. Hence in walking the tendency for one foot to follow the other
in the direction of A and the centrifugal tendency of the toes. As women
learn to wear shorter skirts or wear short skirts a greater proportion
of the time the likelihood that they will be intoed will naturally
decrease.”
[Illustration]
“Very convincing!” I cried. “The intoed tendency is beautifully
extenuated in a most logical way. Plainly it would be as foolish for a
woman to walk with her toes out as it would be for a cavalryman to ride
with his knees out.”
“Unless she were going up stairs.”
“Up stairs? Oh, I see. You are to explain the waddling. That will be an
immense comfort to every man—I mean the explanation. So many of us have
turned our faces away from the spectacle of a lovely creature who walked
with a Delsartean lilt and seated herself with the inexpressible grace of
a bird who has reached the chosen branch, mounting a flight of steps with
the roll of a breathless duck.”
“Let us now take this hoople for Figure Two,” said the Gym Girl, with a
serious effect. “The two feet, still represented by the dumb-bells, now
seek not the point of least resistance but the point of most resistance.
They do not wish to tread on the gown, which is likely to happen, even
when it is slightly lifted, unless the knees assist in lifting the
forward edge. This chalk mark extending to A and B will indicate by
its variation from the circular line the direction in which the feet
alternately move in the effort to keep the skirt free in front. Of course
a woman who tries to go up stairs with her hands full, without holding
her skirt, must waddle more than a woman who is able to let her hands
help her feet.”
“I have no doubt that what you have intimated with regard to the
dexterities imposed by the skirt is quite true. There must be a
certain important amount of muscular power not otherwise demanded in
the current method of holding up the skirt with one hand at the back,
or even in twisting the loose of it into a tuft on one hip. The habit
doesn’t seem to be intrinsically pretty, yet it has that fascination
which makes us wonder whether conventional ideas of beauty are of any
importance whatever. I fancy that Greek and Roman women had some such
untransmittable method of managing redundant drapery during those
intervals when the use of beauty gave place to its twin, the beauty of
use.”
[Illustration]
“Yes, I think you will find that from the beginning of time woman has
sought to combine garments in which she may be becomingly draped and in
which she may move abroad. The Professor tells us that a trailing gown is
an anachronism out of doors, save to those women who are carried—you know
what I mean, in a carriage or something. We have heard that a great many
times; but all the same, I suppose women will go on trying to make the
gown they prefer to be seen in do service during the transits as well as
during the pauses.”
“There is much transit about the modern woman.”
“I hope you find something to be glad of in that.”
“I do; but no man can help feeling that draperies are a great burden
which no gallantry can lighten.”
“O yes, gallantry can! See that her packages are sent home—or carry them
for her.”
[Illustration]
“Understand me: I think that draperies held up in the right way by the
right woman are an element of real picturesqueness in modern life. But
sometimes they are not held up at all.”
“Yes, I know. Theoretically a lady does not let her dress drag in an
unclean place. But actually there is a good deal of dragging. It is a
pity, too, if you men are going to be disturbed by it. There should
be consolation for you in the frequent gym suit—which you seldom see,
because you are not often permitted to enjoy your present privileges—and
in the more frequent bicycle suit. The bicycle has done in one decade
what abstract dress reforming would never have accomplished. Sometimes I
think that the most important inventions of the century are the bicycle
and the shirt waist. Each has had an immensely important influence on the
physical and economic situation of women. I have no doubt the bicycle
will get full credit, but if no historian mentions the shirt waist the
shirt waist will proclaim its own triumph.”
[Illustration]
“I believe you have been writing a paper on that.”
“No, I am not a paper-writing girl. One thing I am sure of: The review of
women’s dress during the century will surely dismiss the shirt-waist with
a few lines.”
“I dare say. It will go unsung, like the plain, average, every-day
woman, who is doing so much of the world’s work,—I mean, of course,
except on the Woman’s Page. Do you know you explained some things to me
so beautifully a moment ago that I am tempted to put your sophistry—I
mean your scientific analysis—to the crucial test. Let me do this in a
word:—We have spoken of clothes, and we have spoken of transit. Why do
women get off a public vehicle backward? I say public vehicle advisedly,
for I have seen a woman get on and off a horse properly—assisted. I have
seen her get off a bicycle properly, unassisted. I have even seen her
get out of a coach properly. But few men have ever seen a woman leave a
trolley-car or a railway-coach otherwise than backwards.”
[Illustration]
“When you say ‘backwards,’ I know that you don’t mean backwards in the
sense in which an old lady or a very portly person of any age gets out
backwards,—turning about, holding with both hands, and backing off. That
was the way Ian Maclaren’s old lady tried to get off the underground
train, wasn’t it? and was pulled up the steps at one station after
another by men who thought that she was getting on? You mean getting off
with the face to the rear, instead of with the face to the engine, the
motor, or the horse.”
[Illustration]
“That is what I do mean.”
“I had supposed that there was but one answer to that old question:
Because they have not been trained by getting on and off vehicles while
the vehicles are in motion. A person who gets on a vehicle while it is
in motion learns at once that the forward handle is the only safe handle
to hold either in getting on or getting off. The forward handle is the
one that preserves your balance should the vehicle start while you are
getting on or off.”