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.

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

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.

Contents

I
WITH A DÉBUTANTE

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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?”

“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.”

II
WITH A LEFT-OVER GIRL

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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?”

“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?”

“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.

“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?”

“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.”

III
WITH A GYM GIRL

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Yes,” I said, “that is the old answer, too. But it does not answer 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?”