Man’s Real Attitude Toward the Progress of Woman
The Teacup club came to order with more than its usual reluctance
at its next meeting and the president looked severe. “I wish you
girls would stop talking about Helena and her affairs,” she said. “I
detest gossip, and, besides, I want to hear all about her, too, and
we can talk better after the meeting is over. The topic for to-day’s
discussion will be, ‘Man’s Real Attitude Toward the Progress of Woman.’”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said the girl with the Roman nose. “Men are such
queer creatures that by the time a girl gets to understand them really
she is too old to attract their attention. Now, if we all put our heads
together—”
“We may attain wisdom without its accompanying wrinkles,” broke in the
girl with the dimple in her chin; “that is a good idea, for—”
“It is no real gain to know how to make them bring the proper kind of
flowers and confectionery, if you have to spend the money thus saved on
the beauty doctor; yes, that is true,” sighed the brown-eyed blonde.
“Widowers, or men who have been engaged several times, are often nice,”
said the girl with the eyeglasses.
“Thank you,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin. “I like to do
my own training, if it is troublesome. You can’t persuade a widower
that his late wife was not a type of all womanhood, and that is horrid,
especially if she happens to have had a taste for domestic magazines
and molasses candy! That is why a widower is so much less attractive
than a widow; she—”
“Has learned that men, save for a few leading traits, are all
different,” said the girl with the classic profile. “Yes, matrimony
always widens a woman’s views of the opposite sex, while it narrows
those of a man.”
“Oh, dear,” said the girl with the Roman nose; “I do wish men would not
do one thing and say another. Now, they are always praising domesticity
in women, as well as shrinking modesty, and yet—”
“They always overlook the domestic kind of a girl when she does venture
among people,” broke in the brown-eyed blonde. “I know it, and as for
shyness and modesty, it is only the girl who is bold enough to call
attention to those qualities in herself who receives a social reward
for them.”
“Oh, well,” said the president, “a man with a couple of sisters learns
a great deal about the sex.”
“Humph!” said the girl with the eyeglasses. “I don’t know why it
is, but the more sisters a man has, the slower he is to enter into
matrimony.”
“I’ve noticed that myself,” said the girl with the classic profile;
“while girls who have plenty of brothers usually marry before they are
twenty.”
“Pshaw! That is because the friends of their brothers get a chance to
see them sew on buttons and make caramels,” said the girl with the
Roman nose.
“No, it isn’t,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin, “it is
because such a girl has more than one person to oppose the man who
wants to marry her. But talk about masculine inconsistency! It sets me
wild to hear men talk about domesticity and modesty and all that, and
then hang about Kate, a girl who doesn’t know a frying pan from a—a
camera, and who had as lief ask for a thing she wants as to hint for
it—so unfeminine!”
“I know it,” said the girl with the eyeglasses. “Why, she never has
to buy a flower, and as for candy, she has so much that she actually
shares it with the other girls! I go to see her more frequently in
Lent, because my conscience will not allow me to buy any then, and—”
“And Kate has been engaged six times; she told me so herself,” said the
girl with the eyeglasses. “I declare, it is enough to make a girl—”
“H’m!” said the president. “Don’t forget, my dears, that while she has
been engaged six times, she has not been married once!”
“Why—er—that is true,” cried the blue-eyed girl. “You dear, delightful,
clever thing! I am so glad that I just made you be our president.”
“Oh, well, of course I like it dear; still, as somebody once said, I’d
rather be right than president.”
“Hear, hear!” cried the girl with the Roman nose.
“Yes. But, oh, girls, Tom says that all the men in our set are talking
about this club. He says that Jack Bittersweet asked him confidentially
the other day if being intellectual made a woman less loveable.
Luckily, I had just agreed to let him have a masculine dinner party and
he assured Jack that it did not.”
The blue-eyed girl arose softly from her seat and going over to where
the brown-eyed blonde was sitting, kissed her. “You dear thing,” she
said. “Come over any day you like and you shall see the new sleeve
design I got from Paris yesterday.”
The girl with the dimple in her chin exchanged glances with the girl
with the eyeglasses.
“What time in the year do you prefer for a wedding?” asked the latter,
apropos of nothing.
“Oh, speaking of weddings, that reminds me,” said the girl with the
Roman nose. “I’d have prepared a paper on to-day’s topic, as you
suggested, Evelyn, but Elizabeth asked me to help select her wedding
dress and—well, you know, Elizabeth. It has taken her two days already
and I don’t see any prospect yet of her making up her mind.”
“And yet she required only five minutes in which to decide to accept
Fred, when he asked her to marry him,” said the president, thoughtfully.
“I know, dear, but then in this matter of selecting her dress, she had
a choice,” said the brown-eyed blonde.
“And I’m sure that Elizabeth’s father is delighted to buy her a wedding
dress,” said the girl with the eyeglasses. “Oh, Emily, pardon me—I
quite forgot that Elizabeth is your cousin!”
“Never mind, dear, though I rather like her, in spite of the
relationship. Oh, girls, you have no idea of what an effect this club
is having upon me. Why, I’ve turned my den into a library, cut all the
leaves of my Carlisle and coaxed papa to buy me a handsome writing desk
and do up the walls in forest greens because pink and blue seemed so
frivolous. Now, I can sit in that room and write papers for the club in
real comfort.”
“You don’t know how pleased I am to hear it,” cried the president,
warmly. “It is quite worth all the labor of selecting topics and
leading the discussion, I assure you. Why, Marion, how late you are!
Don’t you know that the really advanced woman is even ahead of the
clock?”
“Yes, I do,” panted the girl with the classic profile, “but, really,
I’ve had the most awful time getting here at all! You know I’m always
in trouble, but really this is the worst that—I’ll never go anywhere
with Nell again, unless it’s to my own funeral, and I can’t help
myself, then.”
“What on earth has Nell done now?” queried the girl with the dimple in
her chin, “don’t you know that you must not expect absolute sanity from
an engaged girl? You said you were going with her to the south side to
call upon some of the relatives of her affianced. Did she take you over
there, and then discover that she didn’t know their exact address? Or
did—”
“The address was not forgotten. We hadn’t meant to do any shopping
to-day, but we stopped in to buy some thread, and really the new silks
were so cheap that—”
“You arrived an hour late, and penniless! I know,” said the blue-eyed
girl.
“N—ot quite. I had ten cents left when we started for home, and we had
to take two lines of cars. Nell and I couldn’t get seats together—in
fact, we were at opposite ends of the car. However, I paid her fare and
signaled the fact to her, receiving a nod in reply.”
“Well?” said the president, “didn’t she want to pay your fare on the
other line?”
“She—well, the fact is that she had misunderstood the signal, and paid
our fare again with her own last dime. And there we were three miles
from home, without a penny in our pockets—and the street car company
had a dime it hadn’t earned. But then Nell never had a grain of sense—I
should think by this time she knew that herself.”
“If she doesn’t, I’m sure you are not to blame, dear,” said the girl
with the Roman nose. “However, for my part, I shall not blame you, even
if you are as cross as a man who is wearing a frayed collar, for the
rest of the afternoon.”
“But, don’t let us interrupt the proceedings,” said the girl with the
classic profile, “just tell me what to-day’s topic is, and I—”
“Oh, it is a perfectly delightful one!” said the blue-eyed girl. “Man’s
real attitude toward the Progress of Woman, and—”
“His real attitude is that of flight,” said the girl with the Roman
nose, “he—”
“Don’t be flippant, dear, whatever you are,” said the president,
gravely, “we have enough of that to endure from our masculine
acquaintances. It seems to me that a man laughs at whatever he fails to
understand, and then feels that he has replied to the argument.”
“Perhaps that is the reason that men laugh at so many jokes in which I
can see nothing funny,” said the girl with the eyeglasses.
“No doubt of it,” said the brown-eyed blonde, “but, girls, never
attempt to imitate them. I did once, and Annie—you know how obtuse she
is—kept asking loudly what I was laughing at, and I couldn’t tell her.
When a man had just made the remark that he was glad to find a girl
with a keen sense of the ridiculous, too!”
“Just like Annie,” said the blue-eyed girl. “I sometimes wonder whether
she is really obtuse or only malicious. You know how devoted Tommy
Bonds is to music, don’t you? Well, Annie and I once accompanied him to
a Thomas concert, and I wanted to make myself agreeable—”
“I hope you didn’t do it by conversing while the orchestra was
playing,” said the president.
“Of course not, goosie. But I remembered that he always says a woman
should be two things—sincere and fond of music. The soloist was a
pianist, I can’t remember his name, but his hair was not at all
remarkable. When he played an encore, Tommy leaned over to me, and
said: ‘Isn’t it charming?’ and I replied, ‘Yes, I like it better every
time I hear it; in fact, I often ask people to play it for me.’ I wish
now that I hadn’t said that.”
“Why so?” asked the president, “it seems to me just the right thing to
say.”
“But Annie leaned over asking, loudly, ‘What is the name of it?’ and,
to my horror, Mr. Bonds said he didn’t know, and it was all so sudden
that, to save my life, I couldn’t make up a name! In the silence which
followed, some one in front of us was heard remarking that the encore
was a composition by the pianist himself, and now played for the first
time in public!”
“And it was all Annie’s fault, too,” said the girl with the dimple in
her chin. “By the way, did I ever tell you how it happened that Mr.
Bonds gave up calling me a delightful conversationalist? No? Well, you
see, he lived almost opposite to us, and he practiced on the ’cello
until papa, who is very fond of De Quincey, said he no longer dared to
read “Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts.” Suddenly he stopped
practicing, and—”
“Mercy on us, had anything happened to him?” gasped the president,
turning pale.
“Nothing ever happens to people who deserve it. As it happened,
however, we were no better off, for some one, a new resident of the
street, we supposed, began to practice on the violin seven hours a
day!”
“It may not have been a newcomer,” observed the girl with the
eyeglasses. “It is a fact that one vigorous soprano is enough to
demoralize a whole neighborhood, and I suppose—”
“The ’cello is quite as bad? Possibly so, at any rate rents went down
in the neighborhood and placards went up. One day I happened to meet
Mr. Bonds, and as long as my father was not within hearing distance, I
said: ‘Oh, I’m sorry that you have given up your delightful ’cello.’ If
you could have seen the rapture on his face.”
“I’d rather have seen his face than that of your guardian angel,”
remarked the girl with the classic profile; “but go on; don’t stop.”
“I wish I had stopped then, but I didn’t. I said, ‘By the way, who is
it that scrapes the violin all day long? I never heard anything so
awful in my life!’ Oh, girls, I—”
“But I don’t see anything wrong in that,” said the president.
“He did. You see, he had given up the ’cello and taken to the violin
with the idea of astonishing the world with his genius!”
“And you live to tell it,” said the girl with the Roman nose.
“M—yes—you see, everything has its compensation. When papa heard what I
had done, he gave me a hundred dollars and his blessing.”
“What luck some people have,” said the brown-eyed blonde, “while
others—oh, girls, I know something perfectly lovely, but I don’t know
whether I ought to tell it to you or not. My conscience—”
“Why, Frances,” said the president, “I shall be awfully hurt if you
don’t tell us now. When a girl speaks of her conscience in that way, it
simply means that she distrusts her audience. You might know by this
time, that we never tell anything which transpires at a meeting of this
club.”
“Of course not,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin. “Why, Dick
teased me vainly a whole evening to find out the line of argument
advanced in favor of equal suffrage when we discussed ‘Woman in
Politics’ the other day. The janitor must have told him the topic under
discussion,” she added hastily.
“Very likely,” said the president. “What was that you wished to tell
us, Frances, dear?”
“It was something that happened to Nell,” said the brown-eyed blonde.
“Her fiancé had told her a great deal of his friend, Mr. Thynker, of
Boston, who is to be his best man, and whom she had never seen. He
appeared suddenly at Mr. Dickenharry’s office the other day, just as
the latter was starting for Milwaukee, and there was barely time for
him to make arrangements with Mr. Thynker to call on Nell the following
afternoon. As it happened, he knew the Vansmiths, and was asked to the
luncheon they gave that day, and seated immediately opposite to Nell.
Of course he didn’t catch her name when they were introduced, and there
was no chance for explanations. Oh, girls, I wonder if I really ought
to finish this?”
“If you don’t, I shall ask Nell why you didn’t,” said the president.
“Well, during a lull in the conversation, he leaned forward and, in
loud, clear tones, asked Nell what kind of a girl his friend Tom
Dickenharry had got himself engaged to _this_ time!”
“M’hm,” said the president, after the laughter had subsided a little,
“that settles one matter in advance, anyhow. It is easy to know upon
whose side the victory will rest when they have their first quarrel
after marriage.”
“There is one question I would like to ask the members of this club,”
said the girl with the eyeglasses, “and it is one which nearly
disrupted our little Shakespeare club: If you really want to please a
man—any man—what is the best way to go about it?”
“That is really such a simple question that there is only one answer
possible,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin.
“And that is—”
“Be born rich.”
“But, suppose you have neglected that qualification,” persisted the
girl with the eyeglasses.
“Learn to cook; but never let him taste the result of your cookery,”
said the blue-eyed girl.
“Yes—or wear his college colors,” said the girl with the classic
profile.
“Let him do all the talking,” said the brown-eyed blonde.
“Praise the shape of his head—no matter what it may be,” said the
president. “I wouldn’t tell anybody that,” she added, reflectively,
“only that two fortune tellers and a palmist have assured me that my
husband will outlive me.”
“Mr. Bonds has a very well-shaped head,” observed the girl with the
eyeglasses, “a little long perhaps, but—”
“The rotundity of his pocketbook over-balances that,” broke in the girl
with the dimple in her chin.
“Clarissa says he is generous, too—a rare quality in a really wealthy
man,” said the blue-eyed girl.
“M—I don’t know about his generosity,” said the president. “A marriage
license is about as inexpensive a thing as a man can buy, and yet he
has displayed no desire to invest in one.”
“Oh, pshaw, that makes no difference,” said the girl with the Roman
nose, “lots of girls nowadays don’t intend to marry, anyhow, so—”
“I wonder why they never think to mention the fact publicly until after
they are thirty,” mused the girl with the dimple in her chin; “oh,
girls, shouldn’t you like really to do something wonderful?”
“I once wore a pair of common-sense shoes a whole month,” said the
blue-eyed girl, modestly.
“H’m; who was the Englishman?” asked the brown-eyed blonde, “the one
with whom you used to walk at that time, I mean,” she added, pleasantly.
“It was the spring that Mr. Penny-Lesse was here, but I don’t see what
that had to do with it,” said the blue-eyed girl, with great dignity.
“Nothing at all of course,” said the brown-eyed blonde, “I only—”
“You did not meet him, I believe; he was very particular about the
people to whom he was introduced,” said the girl with the dimple in her
chin, sweetly. “I did rather an unusual thing myself once—I had five
dollars in my pocketbook when my allowance came due!”
“Yes, but you had left the pocketbook at my house ten days before, and
thought it was lost,” said the girl with the classic profile, “don’t
you remember, I only brought it over after the shops were closed the
evening before?”
“Oh, girls,” said the president, “I’ve recently met a woman who has
traveled all through Asia, and—”
“I suppose she did it in bloomers and one of those horrid, unbecoming,
stiff caps, too,” broke in the brown-eyed blonde. “Well, all I’ve got
to say is that a woman who has the courage to make such a guy of
herself, is brave enough to face all the tigers and mountain lions,
and—er—boa constrictors in Asia.”
“I don’t believe there are any boa constrictors and mountain lions in
Asia,” said the girl with the Roman nose. “As for tigers—”
“Mercy, how literal you are!” pettishly replied the brown-eyed blonde.
“Well, buffalos then; how will that suit you? I’m equally afraid of all
of them, myself.”
“Oh, girls,” cried the girl with the dimple in her chin, “Marion and I
have just had such fun. We have been telling each other the most awful
things that ever happened to us in our lives.”
“Perhaps that is what made you late, too,” remarked the president, in a
severe tone.
“N-not exactly. You see, I knew there was something wrong about my
watch, and I could not remember whether it was thirteen minutes fast or
thirteen minutes slow, so—”
“But do tell us what was the most awful thing that ever happened to
you, Evelyn,” cried the girl with the classic profile. “The very worst
thing that ever befell me was connected with a timepiece. It was last
summer, and a man who—who had been very nice to me was going away early
the next morning. Men were scarce at the seashore, as you know, and
when a lot of the girls saw us sitting on the porch they came over and
spent the evening with us. We just could not get a chance for a word
alone.”
“I know—I know,” groaned the girl with the dimple in her chin.
“Yes. Well, his train was to go at 5:16 A.M., and he asked me in the
most meaning tone if I cared sufficiently to hear something he had to
say to get up early enough to see him off. I—I said I did.”
“Well?” said the girl with the Roman nose.
“I set my watch by the hall clock in order to be sure of getting up
in time; then I lay awake nearly all night so I would not oversleep
myself. When I reached the station it was five minutes past six.”
“Watch stopped?” asked the girl with the eyeglasses.
“No; Harry had run down to spend that evening with Kate, and she had
set the clock back. The man was married in October to one of the girls
who had risen in time to see him off.”
“Of course,” said the president. “Speaking of awful things—you all know
how afraid I am of fire.”
“We do,” said the girl with the Roman nose. “I believe you could smell
a burning match a block away.”
“Well, the other day our fire insurance ran out, and Tom handed me the
money and asked me to go down and renew it, as he was very busy. I
forgot all about it until night; then I lay awake sniffing smoke until
Tom thought I had influenza again. Next morning I got ready to go and
attend to it at once. I wanted to look nice, too, because one of the
men in that office once told Tom that he had an awfully pretty wife.”
“How much money did he borrow from Tom that time?” asked the girl with
the dimple in her chin.
“I was curling my hair,” went on the president, unheeding, “when I
smelled fire. I ran wildly all through the house, with a curl still
wrapped about the iron, trying to locate it!”
“And did you find any?” asked the brown-eyed blonde.
“Yes; my own hair was burning,” said the president, with a groan.
“How awful!” said the girl with the eyeglasses. “That reminds me of
what once happened to me. It was when I was wearing a single curl in
the middle of my forehead. One day Frank was there, and he—he would
twist it over his finger and quote poetry about it until he took all
the curl out of it. Of course I discovered that I had no handkerchief
and went up to get one.”
“I don’t see anything so awful in that,” said the girl with the classic
profile.
“No, dear; but while I was curling it I dropped the hot iron down my
back, and dared not even scream lest he find out what I was doing.”
“The worst thing that ever happened to me,” said the girl with the
dimple in her chin, “was in connection with Lewis. As soon as it was
settled, I went to tell Emmeline, so she would give up trying to get
him. I said I was his first love, and she couldn’t imagine how jealous
he was. ‘Oh, yes, dear, I can,’ said she; ‘he was always so when he was
engaged to me!’”
“I wondered why you broke with him,” said the president. “Well, we must
adjourn now, and I must say that I have never heard a subject more
logically discussed than the one to-day!”