enough. I have disproved its accuracy a score of times. I have seen
women who knew better by precept, by example, and by experience get off
backward, as if obeying some fatalistic impulse. The other day a woman
who stepped off a car in my presence, firmly grasping the wrong handle,
laughed and said, ‘There! that’s the wrong handle, but I can’t help
it!’ That illustrates what I mean. She could not tell why she _had_ to
take the wrong handle, which, if the car had been going in the other
direction would have demanded the other hand. Your theory at best would
only explain why women do not get off rightly. It does not explain why
nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand get off wrongly. It would
be well enough if the proportions were even, if the habit seemed like a
matter of chance. But quite plainly it is not a matter of chance. There
is a strange, and, as yet, unexplained impulse to which women yield when
the moment of choice comes. Every day I see women get off the wrong way
at real inconvenience. They are like Jerome K. Jerome’s stage villain who
doesn’t want to be a villain, who is not profited by being a villain, but
who, quite uncomplainingly, goes on being the villain in obedience to
the unities. Once I thought I had grasped the thing, which you must know
gave me a moment of superior comfort. A coach or a car, I said to myself,
generally stops at a point beyond that at which the passenger really
wishes to alight, as at the further curb, and in getting off and spurning
the vehicle, as it were, the woman passenger, acting with primitive
directness, turns her back upon it at the moment of alighting. But I have
repeatedly seen women get off a trolley-car at a near corner when they
had to turn about and walk in the direction the car was going, and they
faced the rear of the car when they got off just as they do under all
other circumstances. It is extraordinary. You must not think the inquiry
trivial. It is not merely a question of a minor physical habit. There
certainly is some momentous psychological significance under it all,
something with a deep meaning if we only could get at it.”
“Perhaps this backwardness has something to do with woman’s confusion as
to right and left.”
“Heavens!” I exclaimed. “I thought for an instant you were going to say
right and wrong! The right and left confusion explains nothing, for in
those directions in which people are confused as between right and left
they are as likely to take one as the other. How could that explain why a
woman uses her right hand when she should use her left, and her left when
she should use her right?”
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t, unless you wished to fortify some theory of
her natural perverseness, and I hope you don’t wish to be so trite.
You shouldn’t hurry woman too much. See what physical agility she is
displaying with the bicycle. She is unfolding wonderfully. You men are
too impatient. I read an advertisement the other day in which I saw
a tangible sign of this impatience. It was headed. ‘A Moustache in a
Month.’ Surely that is wrong.”
“Yes, it is as wrong as the conditions indicated by a department store
advertisement I read the other day which began: ‘Great Embroidery
Excitement.’”
“O, I know we are all too intense. I understand that it is telling in our
appearance. A scientific observer has been reminding us that we Americans
have too much expression, and that the dull, stupid look in certain
English faces, for instance, indicates reserve force, a force that is not
constantly being wasted in expression. They say we even go to sleep with
our expressions. My teacher says, ‘When you go to bed, unlock your face.’”
“Are teachers really bothering you about your expressions? Your teacher
must be a woman.”
“She is, and—”
“I thought so. Only a woman—”
[Illustration]
“Yes, I know. Our expressions are too lovely to be ruthlessly modified. I
credit you with all that you could say. But you are not a bit practical.
Our nerves are more important than our expressions. I guess you may
count on us for expression enough when the occasion demands. What we want
are healthy nerves behind the expressions.”
“I see; you are going in for that stupid look now.”
“If it becomes necessary.”
“You never will succeed.”
“Probably I don’t want you to hope we will. You know what I mean—”
“How can I help knowing? Do we hear anything else but relaxing? Those of
you who are not relaxing tremendously are repenting of your outlines and
straining to get thin.”
“Don’t you suppose there are great advantages in these readjustments?
When a girl is very pretty she is pampered; when she is pampered she
grows fat; when she grows fat she grows ugly; and so things are balanced.”
“Let me amend that,” I said. “When she gets fat she gets frightened,
diets, and gets fatter. Then she gets a little angry, golfs, rides,
swims, hustles, finds the secret, gets reasonably proper again and
acquires the new charm that comes with the aroused energy and the
humility of a threatened loss—or gain, as you may wish to put it. Nothing
is more qualifying than the threatened adversity of fat. We all know
women who would be simply insufferable if they were not a shade plumper
than they care to be. I fancy that leanness induces a more private
humility.”
[Illustration]
“It is a more private defect. But this is all to be righted in the
next century. Our new ideals are going to give us more of the English
physique. Anyway, we are going to be more athletic, not merely in this
gymnasium way, which is only a sign of good faith, but in a broader, more
practical, more—shall I say final?—way. See what summer means to us now.”
“Well, it seems to mean a great many things.”
“It means everything that could make a gym unnecessary. It once meant
very little, it seems to me; if we are to believe what our grandmothers
tell us. Now it means as much to a girl as to her brother.”
“It doesn’t mean quite as much as it might if there were more
brothers—there.”
[Illustration]
“True. Our summer groups always make me think of college. We are not
through seeing too much of one another when we graduate. Presently we
are in clubs or gym classes, and, in the summer, man is an exceptional
element.”
“And that is not good for him. It is not good for him to be in such a
majority in the city nor in such a minority in the country. But I don’t
see what we can do about it.”
“I suppose each sex will have to go on living out the problem for itself.
That seems likely to keep both sexes busy.”
“It is keeping your sex busy.”
“You never can tell about us.”
“I admit that.”
“We have great larks over the profound things, and go to pieces—”
“Relaxing.”
[Illustration]
She laughed, and got up in her easy, definite way. “You must go now,—not
because you have been naughty, but because the class is coming.”
“That is a class decision. But I bow to your ruling, Miss Gym.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
IV
WITH A HEROINE
[Illustration]
When I asked her what sort of heroine she was, she looked up with a laugh
and said that she didn’t see how it was possible to say precisely until
the end of the story.
“And yet,” I said, “one generally can make a good guess before the last
chapter comes.”
“Then you may do that,” she rejoined.
“I dare say I might find out by the process of elimination. You are not a
heroine because you are travelling alone from Los Angeles to Richmond?”
“No. In this age and country there isn’t a particle of heroism in that.
Why, you remember that ‘a woman might travel from one end of Britain to
the other with safety in Eadwine’s day.’”
“It is not because you are travelling in a bicycle suit?”
“No. There are no more heroics in clothes.”
“Perhaps you have been ordered home against your wishes, and are
illustrating that pleasant miracle ‘fair looks and true obedience’?”
“No. I rather enjoy being obedient; and I am going of my own accord.”
“Then I have no doubt that your going out there had something heroic
about it; or maybe—”
“Those are all wide of the mark. I hardly think you are likely to guess
correctly.”
“Well,” I said, “there is one comfort: I can see precisely what sort
of heroine you are—in appearance. That is a great start. Nowadays, we
have to do a heap of guessing as to the embodied element in the heroines
we read about. We all have prejudices, and it is nice to get rid of
them at the beginning. I knew of a New England lady who was immensely
disappointed in her new pastor because, as she said, she ‘never could
abide a minister who was light complected.’”
“I am sorry to rob you of the privilege of fashioning the physical
heroine after your own fancy. I always like to have at least a little
of my own way in the matter of the hero. When he is described too
circumstantially there is nothing left for me. You see I might object to
the hero who was light complected.”
[Illustration]
“O, I can see,” I said, “that you probably dote on these disembodied
novels that deal entirely with emotions, that have been trying
for a decade or two to get as far as possible from the Dickens
Gentleman-with-the-White-Waistcoat point of view. For a long time it
seems to have been considered vulgar in a literary sense to descend to
the description of clothes—as if clothes were not of great importance in
helping us to get at the character of a man—or a woman.”
“But we don’t need that help in a book, do we, when we have the author to
tell us what is inside?”
“Yes, that is what those fellows will tell you. But is that really so?
When we know what the character looks like—that is, what the author
thinks the character looks like—do we not gain a definite and necessary
impression beyond that which the author sets out to give?”
“Perhaps the author doesn’t want you to go wandering off that way. When
he is so ready to tell you what is inside, what is the use of giving you
material for any other impression?”
“Because the reader will have an impression of his own anyway, and the
author owes him all the facts. Now, let us suppose that some one was
to go on with a story about you, a mysterious young woman in a Pullman
coach; can’t you see that it would be vastly more interesting to me
because I could picture you easily as the story went on? Don’t you
suppose that I should be more likely to be interested in your emotions
because I had seen you than I should in seeing you because I had heard
about your emotions?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it would depend. But if you are going back
to old-fashioned romance what is the use of describing the heroine? She
is always the same. Wait a moment.”
[Illustration]
She picked up a book that lay beside her. It was “Monte Cristo.” I had
lent it to her the day before when the train boy had nothing more that
she wanted. I had seen her read three novels through in one day. Perhaps
there was something malicious in this intrusion of a book that she
couldn’t finish in a day. Now she was reading from “Monte Cristo”—
“‘A young and beautiful girl, with hair as black as jet, her eyes as
velvety as the gazelles, was leaning with her back against the wainscot,
rubbing in her slender fingers, modelled after the antique, a bunch of
heath blossoms ...; her arms bare to the elbow, embrowned and resembling
those of the Venus at Arles, ... and she tapped the earth with her pliant
and well-formed foot.’ There you have it,—that is the formula. And
wait—here is the other: ‘A more perfect specimen of manly beauty could
scarcely be imagined.’ That is the formula for the hero. Do these delight
you?”
“Yes; it is primitive, but I like it. I have enjoyed ‘Monte Cristo’ on
this journey even for its faults. It is ultimate romance, and I think I
like it much better than the ultimate in realism. I like the heroine to
be pretty. Unless the author specifically denies it, I always believe
that she _is_ pretty. You see I am hopelessly old-fashioned; and you are
hopelessly modern. Probably you don’t care at all how the story comes
out.”
“Oh, I am not so modern as that! I do care. What I like about realism is
that you aren’t so sure how it will turn out. Doesn’t it always seem to
you like a waste of time to make them all so miserable when they are to
live happily ever after anyway?”
“It doesn’t seem to me any worse than making them happy with the
certainty that they are going to be dismal by and by. I suppose I have a
serious limitation somewhere, but I should rather see people painfully
happy than amusingly miserable, which seems to be the dilemma in which
you insist upon finding us all.”
[Illustration]
“I am like one of those lawyers who delight in saying, ‘We don’t admit
anything, Your Honor.’”
“Maybe you _are_ a lawyer,” I interposed, “and are a heroine because you
refused a magnificent retainer for reasons of conscience?”
But she shook her head again. “I was going to say,” she went on, “that
romance simply is too sentimental for me. What you would call the
monotonous dead level isn’t so stupid as the antirealism critics like to
make out. Take the present entirely commonplace incident. I meet you on a
railway train. For my soul’s good, you feed me with romance, and exhibit
a most entertaining curiosity. Now all that isn’t stupid, is it?”
“Thanks, gentle lady.”
“Then why may we not like in a book the sort of thing we enjoy in life?”
[Illustration]
“But I should insist that all this is romance. You are a heroine, and
if I am not a hero, I am playing leading man just now, which has great
possibilities. We are being hurled through space at a speed of sixty
miles an hour. By and by a dark-skinned person will loom at the door and
say that dinner is ready in the dining car, and you will let me open
all the doors for you to the third coach ahead; and we will eat, drink,
and be merry at the parting of the ways, and you will twit me for my
New York accent in the most musical dialect that ever was invented by
the Anglo-Saxon race. Yet I do not know your name, and you do not know
mine. We are two detached fragments of human society appositely placed
in a Pullman section, impelled by the social instinct and chaperoned by
a corporation. All the elements are modern. Can not you see the very
essence of romance in the situation?”
“On the contrary it appears to me as quite realistic. It all might happen
any day. I shall go on happening to some one, and you to someone else,
every day.”
“I see; it is realism because it will not end anywhere in particular.”
“Will you listen to a fable?” she demanded suddenly.
“Is it a little thing of your own? Of course I shall listen.”
“Once there was a princess—”
“Dear me!” I cried. “I’m sorry for that. Doesn’t a story that begins with
a heroine instead of with a hero always end sadly?”
“This is a fable,” she said. “It was a long time ago, when the heroine
_could_ be named Maud, though this heroine was not. Well, the princess
fell in love with a prince.”
“Do you mean _first_?” I asked.
“I know what you will say,” she continued, not heeding my interruption.
“She should not have loved the prince. She should have loved some
romantically impossible person. Anyway, she loved the prince; and more
absurd still, the prince loved the princess. You can see how much more
artistic it would have been for the prince to have been indifferent.
He might at least have had the artistic decency to love the other
princess—or to think that he did, which would have done for a while; but
he was a nice prince, and he loved the princess. At least, you will
say, there should be a parental obstacle, an old fool of a king with
other plans. Or it might be an ill-tempered queen with a bad complexion.
She would have been useful in a good many ways. But, no; not a single
relative opposed either the prince or the princess.”
“Then what on earth did they do?” I asked.
“Happily there appeared a sinister little dwarf. I don’t remember where
he came from, but he was U. C. in the nick of time or heaven knows what
_would_ have happened. ‘See here,’ said the dwarf, ‘she will be perfectly
insufferable if you act in this way. Women are not what they used to be.’
‘Oh, come now,’ said the prince, ‘I have heard that before.’ ‘I assure
you,’ persisted the dwarf, ‘that what women get easily they don’t value
at all. You will make her think there are no other fish in the sea. She
will expect too much of you. You will never be able to live up to the
situation. Moreover, she never will feel the delight of possession that
comes after doubt and difficulty. She will sigh for something that can
come only after the sweet agony of deferred hope.’ ‘Aren’t you getting
rather deep?’ asked the prince. But the dwarf held to the point. ‘Whom
Love loveth he perplexeth. First make her doubt,’ he said, ‘or she never
will believe.’ Then the dwarf went to the heroine. ‘Your Highness,’ he
began, then dropped his flourish, and stepping close to her, whispered:
‘You are making a great mistake. You never can hold the prince. You act
like a shop girl who has won the floor walker. You have the engaged look
in its most silly form. You threw yourself at him. You know you did. He
knows you did. When you are securely married he will act accordingly.
Your mother was frantic for him, and has done her best to help you make
yourself ridiculous. Everybody is tittering over the way you dote on him.
Don’t be a fool.’ Well, if either the prince or the princess had been
marrying for policy this chatter would have done no harm. But they were
marrying for love, and love has nerves. Love lacks that conservative
leash that lies in an extraneous motive; and by an absurd chance the
dwarf precipitated an actual quarrel, the prince got to flirting with a
middle-aged duchess whom he despised, and the princess, in a jealous fit,
gave a peevish, mischief-making dowager aunt the opportunity she long had
been looking for, and the match was broken off.”
“Well,” I asked patiently, “who was the dwarf?”
“The spirit of romance, of course, the principle which insists that
something shall happen every thousand words—Oh, an entertaining and
well-meaning fellow, promising that everything shall come out all
right in the end, whatever happens. But you can’t trust him. And if he
does fling his hand at the end and assure you that everything is all
right, _is_ everything all right? Do the scars count for nothing? Will
the interest of joy on the investment of misery prove to be a fair
compensation? Realism doesn’t promise so much. Realism doesn’t always
insist on a wedding, but may it not say quite as truthfully sometimes
that they lived happily ever after?”
[Illustration]
“I like your fable well enough,” I said. “I should reward you by
telling another. But it would be a pity to spoil by any attempt at the
antithetical the fine neutral effect of your picture. You see, if nothing
more happens, it is realism. If they marry after all, it is romance.
Do you know that I sometimes have thought that life is so much colored
by art that some people are afraid to let matters turn out happily at
the end for sheer dread of being romantic. After all, marriage is very
romantic. It is so romantic that romance chooses it for the finale, for
the supreme reward; while realism every day is insisting that it shall
be the dreadful thing that has happened before the curtain goes up. Yes,
I know that realism marries too, but shamefacedly, with a reservation.
A realistic marriage is as intensely qualified as an emotion by Henry
James. You may not discern the string that is attached to it. But it is
there. The author likes to leave that reservation rankling in your mind.
I love thorough-going romance for one thing: its habit of not annoying
you with qualifying elements. It likes to stir things up prodigiously,
but it isn’t mean about it. It doesn’t describe a lovely scene and
then temper the sentimentality of the moment by having the gardener’s
wheelbarrow under the window creak maddeningly. It not only doesn’t mate
a little, slope-shouldered hero and a tall heroine with freckles, but it
exhibits from end to end that antipathy to what really has happened which
is characteristic of all enduring art.”
“You are saying that as if you actually meant it. My suspicion is that
your ardor is incited by the spectacle of a woman defending realism. A
man likes his heroines to be romantic, that is to say, sentimental. The
traditional attitude of a woman _is_ sentimental. The whole structure
of a man’s scheme is based upon that assumption. Man doesn’t like to
see woman without awe. He doesn’t like to see her belittle the tragedy
of life or to hear her say in the presence of comedy, as Stevenson said
of his ‘Prince Otto,’ that ‘none of it is exactly funny, but some of it
is smiling.’ Yet in spite of your prejudices, I am much afraid that the
American girl is a realist. If she consents to glance at romance it must
be romance leavened by satire.”
[Illustration]
“I wish that I might contradict you, but I fear that Miss America is
realistic. The worst of it is, that she makes it become her somehow.
But I insist that, broadly, this is wrong. Art and logical realism are
contradictions, and despite tradition I believe that the American girl is
too reasonable to like unmitigated realism. She is more superbly alive to
facts than any other girl in the world, for she reads what she chooses,
and, to supplement that uncertain agency, sees pretty much all that goes
on in the world. She is not so greatly as formerly under the necessity
suggested by Franklin to a woman friend, to ‘have a good dictionary
at hand to consult immediately when you meet with a word you do not
comprehend the precise meaning of.’ But she is not without sentiment. Her
patriotism declares this. Moreover, she reads most of the novels, and
most of the novels are not realistic. Now, here is a novel that interests
me for several reasons. It is a bright book. It is more than a bright
book. It is a strong book. I am going to let you read it if you finish
‘Monte Cristo’ before dinner.”
“Don’t keep me waiting for the name.”
“It has one of those blind names that you like if you like the book. It
is called ‘The Sacrifice.’ It has a heroine who has won me completely.
With no disparagement to you, she is an American heroine.”
“What is the book about?”
“Mostly it is about this girl, and I assure you that you will not think
there is too much of her. You see, I am particular about my heroines. I
can go a little haziness, or a little crudeness, in the heroes I read,
but I like the heroines—”
“To be like Mercedes?”
“One can’t complain of Dumas there. Mercedes is one of the most human
characters in ‘Monte Cristo.’”
“Is there not a touch of satire in that?”
“You have read that book before,” I declared emphatically.
“A long time ago. But let me hear about ‘The Sacrifice.’”
“The heroine of ‘The Sacrifice’—but I should not destroy your interest in
the story.”
“Please go on.”
“This girl makes a mistake in throwing over a young fellow—”
“The author begins with an old situation.”
“Yes, but you should see the way he manages it. The girl does not call
the lover back, or seek an opportunity to propose to him; neither does
she grow sour and leathery. There are certain other reasons why the
situation is singular—but you must read the thing yourself. I should like
to have your judgment of it.”
[Illustration]
“Why?”
“One heroine’s view of another—”
“Be serious.”
“I comply: Because if you like her, that is to say, if you like the way
the author has treated her, the principles you have been enunciating are
Pickwickian, which is quite likely. In brief, if you justify the author
you have destroyed the justification for your own philosophy, or what has
just been passing for your philosophy. After all, I dare say that you
are hampered by being a heroine yourself. How extremely odd it would be
if you should turn out to be an embodied heroine out of some story—”
[Illustration]
“That would mean that I was out of a romance?”
“Yes, out of a romance,—they are the most real,—and if you should appear
in the flesh and exploit your own theories as to how the thing should be
done,—only that I should advise you if you are an embodied heroine to go
to your own author. I really don’t recognize you as any heroine of mine.
Your own author would understand you better—not altogether, but better
than any one else. He would know your little perversities, and how to
add, subtract, and divide you. But probably if you were a materialized
heroine—which might mean, I suppose, that I was the medium and this a
daylight _séance_—you would say what you did not mean,—or, what is so
much worse, say what you almost did mean.”
“No,” she said, “I am not a materialized literary spirit. You will not
wake up in a few moments and find that I am a bad dream. I am quite
real. I could prove this to you by admitting that I am getting hungry.
Only a very real woman will admit that she is hungry. Does it not occur
to you that we all are living some story, and that some of us who are
romanticists at heart live realism by force of circumstances; and that
some of us who are realists are forced to yield to the inexorable
momentum of romance?”
“Yes,” I said, “and you would be miserable if you were not expressing
this paradox. The only way a woman can justify herself for believing
in golden knights and the Rubaiyat and the Oversoul is by marrying a
soap-boiler who reads Laura Jean Libbey.”
“That is a tribute to her sense of proportion.”