WOMEN WHO WALK BEST
A few weeks ago I was watching the church parade in Hyde Park, London,
between the statue of Achilles and Stanhope Gate, when I met an American
lady of my acquaintance. We walked together for awhile, and then sat
down in order to watch the fashionable crowd more closely.
It is said that, although Americans and Englishmen think a great deal of
one another nowadays, you seldom hear American women praise the women of
England, and more seldom still hear English women say a good word of
American women.
So I was tickled to know what my American lady friend thought of the
crowd that was performing before us, and I asked her to give me her
impressions.
'Well,' she said, 'it is as good as, if not better than, anything that
New York could produce. Possibly on some special occasion Fifth Avenue
might turn out a few lovelier dresses, but the London average is above
the New York average. You see fewer absolute failures here among the
women, while the men are quite unapproachable--surely Londoners are the
best-dressed men in the world.'
'And the New Yorkers the most brand-newly dressed men,' I interrupted.
'But you are right. I like to think that a coat has been worn just more
than once. But please go on.'
'The days when the London girl was really badly dressed are dead and
gone. We have educated her, we Americans, until she has all but reached
our standard. Just think what the London shops were fifteen and even ten
years ago! Something awful! But now I can buy in them everything I want
just as easily as though I were in Paris or New York.
'I don't know whether the supply of pretty dresses and dainty _et
ceteras_ made the demand, or whether it was the other way about, but, at
any rate, there has been a change within the last decade that is almost
a revolution. The London woman of to-day dresses quite as well as her
sister across the Channel or the Atlantic.'
I was getting sadly disappointed, for my lady friend is a critic and a
wit, and I was expecting a few amusing remarks on English women. So I
ventured:
'So you think that now English women can obtain in London dresses just
as pretty as women can in Paris and New York?
'Certainly,' she replied. 'Yet they never look so well, because, you
see, when they get these pretty dresses, these poor English women don't
know how to put them on. The English girl's education is not yet
completed. She has not learned how to carry herself as we have in
America, both at home and at school. You know the splendid air and prima
donna effects that American women can bring off when they choose. These
young English women have hardly a suspicion of them.
'In taste for the delicate things of dress the Londoner is now just
about where she should be; but she has not yet learned how to wear a
dress. A French woman or an American would make fifty per cent, more of
it than the English woman knows how to do; and if this is to be
remedied, English girls will first have to be taught how to walk and how
to hold themselves.'
And no doubt my American friend had hit on the national defect of
English women--their bad way of walking and holding themselves.
One's thoughts naturally fly to Spain, where every member of the
feminine sex, from the little girl of four to the old woman, who in
England would be bent and tottering, knows how to carry herself as if
she were a queen.
If it is true that this result is achieved by the Spanish custom of
carrying everything on the head instead of on the back or in the hand,
it is a pity the English do not make their girls begin at once to carry
their school-satchels in a way that will make them hold their heads up
instead of down, and accentuate gracefully their lines both behind and
in front.
When I was in South Africa I invariably admired the manner in which the
Kaffir and Zulu women walked and held themselves. On watching them I
often exclaimed: 'If English women could only walk and carry themselves
as these women do, with their pretty faces and figures, with their
beautiful skin and complexion, they would have few rivals in the world.'
It is by walking barefooted and carrying everything on their heads that
the women of Kaffirland and Zululand learn to walk so well, to hold
their heads up, to bring their chests forward, to throw back their
shoulders, and give to their gait that gentle swing which is so dainty
and graceful.
American women obtain the same result by being drilled at school, for it
is incontestable, and, I believe, incontested, that they are the best
walking women, and also those who, with the Parisiennes, know best how
to put on their dresses.