MAIDS WIVES AND BACHELORS

by
AMELIA E. BARR

Author of “Jan Vedder’s Wife,” “A Bow of Orange Ribbon,” etc.

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1898

Copyright, 1898,
By Dodd, Mead and Company

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

CONTENTS

1

Maids and Bachelors

Women who have devoted themselves for religious purposes to celibacy have in all ages and countries of the world received honor, but those upon whom celibacy has been forced, either through the influence of untoward circumstances, or as a consequence of some want or folly in themselves, have been objects of most unmerited contempt and dislike. Unmerited, because it may be broadly asserted that until the last generation no woman in secular and social life remained unmarried from desire or from conviction. She was the victim of some natural disadvantage, or some unhappy circumstance beyond her control, and therefore entitled to sympathy, but not to contempt.

Of course, there are many lovely girls who appear to have every advantage for matrimony, and who yet drift into spinsterhood. 2 The majority of this class have probably been imprudent and over-stayed their market. They have dallied with their chances too long. Suddenly they are aware that their beauty is fading. They notice that the suitable marriageable men who hung around them in their youth have gone away, and that their places are filled with mere callow youths. Then they realize their mistakes, and are sorry they have thought being “an awfully silly little thing” and “having a good time” the end of their existence. Heart-aches and disappointments enough follow for their punishment; for they soon divine that when women cease to have men for lovers, and are attended by school-boys, they have written themselves down already as old maids.

Closely allied to these victims of folly or thoughtlessness are the women who remain unmarried because of their excessive vanity—or natural cruelty. “My dear, I was cruel thirty years ago, and no one has asked me since.” This confession from an aunt to her niece, though taken from a play, is true enough to tell the real story of many an 3 old maid. Their vanity made them cruel, and their cruelty condemned them to a lonely, loveless life. Close observation, however, among the unmarried women of any one’s acquaintance will reveal the fact that it is not from the ranks of silly or cruel women that the majority of old maids come. Men do not, as a rule, dislike silly women; and by a wise provision of nature, they are rather fond of marrying pretty, helpless creatures who cannot help themselves. Neither are cruel women universally unpopular. Some lovers like to be snubbed, and would not value a wife they had not to seek upon their knees. There are, therefore, always chances for the silly and cruel women.

It is the weak, colorless women, who have privately strong prejudices, and publicly no assertion of any kind, that have, even in youth, few opportunities. They either lack the power to love strongly or they lack the power to express their feelings. They have not the courage to take any decided step. They long for advances, and when they are made, recoil from them. They are constitutionally so timid that they fear any step 4 or any condition which is a positive and final change. If marriage had some reservations and uncertainties, some loopholes through which they could drag themselves as a final resort, they would be more sure of their own wishes. These are the Misses Feeble-minds, who cast the reproach upon feminine celibacy.

They feel that in some way they have been misunderstood and wronged, and they come finally to regard all other women as their enemies. They worry and fret themselves continually, and the worry and fret sharpen alike their features and their temper. Then their condition is precisely the one most conducive to complaining and spiteful gossiping; and they fall, in their weakness and longing for sympathy, to that level. Thus to the whole class is given a reputation for malevolent railing which does not by any means belong to it. In fact, married women are generally more venomous than old maids. The words of married women have greater weight, and they do more harm; for they can make suggestions and accusations which an old maid could not 5 make with any propriety. An old maid’s gossip is generally without intentional malice; she has nothing to do, and she wants to make herself agreeable; while married women, having plenty else to do, must, as a general thing, talk scandal from pure ill-nature.

There is a large majority of old maids who are to be sincerely respected, and from whose numbers men with sense and intelligence may choose noble wives. They are the pretty, pure, sensible women who have been too modest, and too womanly, to push and scramble in the social ranks. They have dwelt in their own homes, and among their own people, and no one has sought them out. They have seen their youth pass away, and all their innocent desires fade, and they have suffered what few can understand before they reached that calm which no thought of a lover troubles. Sweet faded flowers! How tenderly we ought to regard these gentle victims of those modest household virtues which all men profess to admire, but which few seem desirous to transplant into their own homes.

6

Another class, somewhat kindred to this, is composed of women who have never found their ideal, and have never allowed themselves to invent for any other man those qualities which would elevate him to their standard. And these women, again, are closely allied to those who remain unmarried because they do not, and will not, conform to conventionalities and social rules. They are clever and odd, and likely to remain odd, especially if they refuse to men—as they are most likely to do—that step or two in advance which is the only way to reconcile them to witty or intellectual women.

These varieties of unmarried women are mainly the victims of natural peculiarities, or of circumstances they are not responsible for. But within the last generation the condition of feminine celibacy has greatly altered. It is a fact that women in this day, considerately, and in the first glory of their youth, elect themselves to that condition. Some have imbibed from high culture a high conception of the value of life, and of what they ought to do with their lives; and they will not waste the days of their youth 7 in looking for a husband in order to begin their work. Others have strong individuality, and refuse to give up their time into another’s keeping. The force of character displayed by such resolutions naturally leads to celibacy. No one but a very weak man would be attracted by women of such vital purpose, and weak men would not be tolerated by such strong women.

The wise and the thoughtful may well give such voluntary old maids the full credit of their purpose, for the generality will not believe in resolutions so much above their own consciences and intelligence. They will still sneer at their condition, and refuse to admit that it is of choice. They will throw at them that wearisome old fable of the fox and the grapes, when they might much more correctly quote Sappho’s song of the ripe apples left on the topmost branches of the apple-trees: “Not because they were forgotten of the gatherers, but because they were out of their reach.”

In accord with the fresh development, we are told that the number of unmarried women in the country is steadily on the increase. 8 But this increase will not be ranged among the silly, the weak, or the cruel of the sex. It will come from that class of women whose eyes have been opened by the spread of education and refinement; women not afraid to work for themselves, and who indeed have thoughtfully concluded that their own efforts and their own company will be far better for them than the help and company of any man not perfectly in sympathy with them, or their inferior either in moral or mental calibre. For it is not always a duty to marry; but it is always a duty to live up to our highest conception of what is right and noble and elevating.

But from whatever cause the women of the present and future generations remain unmarried, they will have no need to dread the condition, as unmarried women of the previous generations have had good cause to do. Every year finds them more independent. They are constantly invading fresh trades, and stepping up into more important positions. They live in pretty chambers; they dress charmingly; they have a bank account; they go to the opera 9 and the theatres in their own protection; and instead of being the humble poor relations of married sisters and brothers, they are now their equals, their patrons, and their honored guests. Besides which, old maids have begun to write novels; and in them they have given us such exquisite portraits of their order—women so rich in every womanly grace—hat we are almost compelled to believe the unmarried women in our midst to be the salt of the community.

At any rate, we are beginning to shift the blame and the obloquy of the position to the old bachelors, where it rightly belongs; and this is at least a move in the just and proper direction. For old bachelors have no excuse whatever for their condition. If we omit the natural and necessary exceptions, which are few enough, then pure selfishness and cowardice must account for every other case. Their despised old-bachelorhood is all their own fault. They have always had the tremendous privilege of asking for what they wanted; and half the battle was in that privilege. Men don’t have wives because they 10 don’t ask for them; and they don’t ask for them because they don’t want them; and in this condition lie their shame and their degradation, and the well-deserved scorn with which the married part of both sexes regard them.

Men are also much more contemptible and useless in their celibacy than are women. An old maid can generally make herself of service to some one. If she is rich, she attaches herself to church work, or to art, or to the children of brothers and sisters. Or she travels all over the world, and writes a book about her adventures. If she is poor, she works hard and saves money; and thus becomes an object of interest and respect in her own set. Or she is nurse and helper for all that need her help in her village, or her church, or her family. At any rate, she never descends to such depths of ennui and selfishness as do the old bachelors who loll about on the club sofas, or who dawdle discontentedly at afternoon teas. An old maid may be troublesome in church business, or particular in household affairs; but it takes an old bachelor to quarrel with waiters and grumble every 11 one insane about his dinner menu. An old maid may gossip, but she will not bore every one to death about her dyspepsia; and if she has to starve others, we may be very certain she would never fall under that tyranny of valets and janitors which are the “sling and arrows” of wealthy, selfish old bachelors.

On the whole, then, the unmarried woman is becoming every year more self-reliant, and more respectable and respected, and the unmarried man more effeminate and contemptible. We look for a day, not far off, when a man will have to become a member of some religious order if he wishes a reputable excuse for his celibacy; and even in secular life it would not be a bad idea to clothe bachelors after forty years of age in a certain uniform. They might also after that age be advised to have their own clubs and recreations; for their assumption of equality with those of their sex who have done their duty as men and citizens is a piece of presumption that married men ought to resent. Men who marry are the honorable progenitors of the future; and their self-denying, busy lives 12 not only bless this generation, but prepare for the next one. The old bachelor is merely a human figure, without duties and without hopes. Nationally and socially, domestically and personally, he is a spoon with nothing in it!

13

The American Girl

One of the most interesting, piquant, and picturesque of all types of feminine humanity is the American girl,—not the hothouse variety, reared for the adornment of luxury, but the every-day, every-where girls that throng the roads leading to the public schools and the normal schools, and who, even, in a higher state of culture fill the halls of learned colleges with a wondrous charm and brightness,—girls who have an aim in life, a mission to fulfil, a home to order, who know the worth of money, who are not ashamed to earn it, and who manage out of limited means to compass all their desires for pretty dresses and summer vacations, and even their pet dream of an ocean voyage and a sight of the Old World.

Physically, these girls enjoy life at its highest point. Look at their flushed cheeks and 14 bright, fearless eyes, and watch their light, swift, even steps. They have no complaint to make of the heat, or the sunshine, or the frost; they have not yet heard of the east wind. Rain does not make them cross; and as for the snow, it throws them into a delicious excitement; while the wind blowing their dresses about them in colored clouds only makes them the more eager to try their strength against it.

That these girls so physically lovely should have the proper mental training is a point of the gravest personal and national importance. And it is the glory of our age that this necessity has been nobly met. For the American girl, “Wisdom has builded her house and hewn out her Seven Pillars;” and as she points to the lofty entrance she cries to all alike, “Go up; the door is open!” If the girls of fifty years ago could have known the privileges of our era how would they have marvelled and rejoiced and desired “to see their day.”

But manifold as her privileges are, the American girl generally knows how to use them. She proves daily that the parable of 15 the ten talents did not refer to men only. Indeed, the fault girls are most likely to fall into is the belief that they each and all possess every one of the talents. In reality this is so seldom the case that it is impossible to educate all girls after one pattern; and it is therefore a grand thing for a girl to know just what she can and cannot do. For if she have only five talents there is no advantage to be gained by creating fictitious ones, since the noblest education is that which looks to the development of the natural abilities, whether they be few or many, fashionable or unfashionable.

Ask the majority of people “What is education?” and they will be apt to answer “The improvement of the mind.” But this answer does not take us one step beyond the starting-point. Probably the best and most generally useful rule for a girl is a deliberate and conscientious inquiry into her own nature and inclinations as to what she wants to do with her education. When she has faithfully answered the inquiry she is ready to prepare herself for this end. For it is neither necessary nor yet possible that 16 every girl should know everything. Besides which, the growth of individuality has made special knowledge a thing of great value, and on all occasions of importance we are apt to defer to it. If we cross the Atlantic we look for a captain who has a special knowledge of its stormy ways. If we are really ill we go to a specialist on our ailment, no matter what “pathy” we prefer. Special knowledge has a prima facie worth, and without inquiry into a subject we are inclined to consider specialists on the subject better informed than those who have not this qualification. Hence the importance of cultivating some one talent to such perfection as will enable a girl, if need be, to turn it into money.

There is another point in the preparation of the American girl for the duties of life which is often undervalued, or even quite ignored; it is the little remembered fact that all our moral and intellectual qualities are very dependent for their value on our surroundings. The old Quakers used to lay great stress upon being “in one’s right place.” When the right person is in the 17 right place there is sure to be a success in life; failure in this respect is almost certain misfortune; a fine accountant before the mass, a fine lady in the wilderness, are out of their places, and have lost their opportunity. And so educational accomplishments which would bring wealth and honor in a great city may be detrimental to happiness and a drag on duty in an isolated position.

Hence the importance of a girl finding out first of all what she wants to do with her education. For in this day she is by no means cramped in her choice; the most desirable occupations are open to her; she may select from the whole world her arena, and from the fullness thereof her reward. But if her object be a more narrow and conventional one, if all she wishes is to be loved and popular in her own small community, then—if she is wise—she will cultivate only such a happy arrangement of graceful, usual accomplishments as prevail among her class and friends. For a very clever woman cannot be at home with very many people. She is too large for the regular grooves of society; she does not fit into any of its small 18 aims and enjoyments; and though she may have the kindest heart, it is her singularities only that will be taken notice of. If, then, popularity be a girl’s desire, she must not obviously cultivate herself, must not lift herself above her surroundings, nor lift her aspirations higher than the aims which all humanity have in common. And it is a very good thing for humanity that so many nice girls are content and happy with such a life object; for the social and domestic graces are those which touch existence the closest, which sweeten its bitter griefs and brighten its dreariest hours.

It would be foolish to assert that the American girl is without faults. Physically and mentally, she may stand on her merits with any women in the world; morally, she has the shortcomings that are the shadows of her excellences. Principally she is accused of a want of reverence, and setting aside for the present her faults as a daughter, it may be admitted that in general she has little of this quality. But it is largely the consequence of her environments. Reverence is the virtue of ignorance; and the 19 American girl has no toleration for ignorance. She is inquisitive, speculative, and inclined to rely on her own investigations; while the spirit of reverence demands, as its very atmosphere, trust and obedience. It is therefore more just to say that she is so alert and eager herself that when she meets old men and women who have learned nothing from their last fifty years of life, and who therefore can teach her nothing, she does not feel any impulse to offer reverence to mere years. But if gray hairs be honorable, either for matured wisdom, extensive information, or practical piety, she is generally inclined to give that best of all homage, the reverence which springs from knowledge and affection, and which is a much better thing than the mere forms of respect traditionally offered to old age.

It is also said that the American girl is a very vain girl, fond of parading her beauty, freedom, and influence. But vanity is not a bad quality, if it does not run to excess. It is the ounce of leaven in a girl’s character, and does a deal of good work for which it seldom gets any credit. For a great deed a 20 great motive is necessary; but how numberless are the small social and domestic kindnesses for which vanity is a sufficient force, and which would be neglected or ill-done without its influence! As long as a girl’s vanity does not derive its inspiration from self-love there is no necessity for her to wear sackcloth to humiliate it. We have all known women without vanity, and found them unpleasant people to know.

There is one fault of the American girl which is especially her fault, and which ought not to be encouraged or palliated although it is essentially the shadow of some of her greatest excellences—the fault of being in too great a hurry at all the turning-points of her life. When she is in the nursery she aches to go to school. When she is a schoolgirl, she is impatient to put on long dresses and become a young lady. As soon as this fact is accomplished, she feels there is not a moment to lose in choosing either a career or a husband. She is always in a hurry about the future, and so frequently takes the wrong turn at the great events of life. She leaves school too soon; she leaves 21 home too soon; she does everything at a rush, and does not do it as well as if she “made haste slowly.”

But what a future lies before these charmingly brilliant American girls, if they are able to take the fullest possession of it! The great obstacle in this achievement is the apparently wholesome opinion that education is sufficient. But the very best education will fall short of its privileges if it be not accompanied with that moral training which we call discipline. Discipline is self-denial in all its highest forms; it teaches the excellent mean between license and repression; without it a girl may have plenitude of knowledge, and a lamentable want of sweetness; so that one only second rate on her intellectual side may be a thousand times more lovable than one who is first rate on her intellectual side, but lacks that fine flavor of character which comes from the expansion of noble inward forces, disciplined and directed to good ends.

Every one understands that no character, however intellectual, is worth anything that is not morally healthy; but morality in a 22 woman is not in itself sufficient. She must have in addition all those charming virtues included in that word of many lights and shades and subtle meanings—womanliness; that word which signifies such a variety of things, but never anything but what is sweet and tender and gracious and beautiful.

23

Dangerous Letter-Writing

Young women are proverbially fond of playing with edged tools, and of all such dangerous playthings a habit of promiscuous, careless letter-writing is the worst; for in most cases the danger is not obvious at the time, and the writer may even have forgotten her imprudence when she has to meet the consequences. The romance, the gush, the having nothing particular to do, the almost insane egotism which makes some young women long to exploit their own hearts, caused poor Madaline Smith to write those foolish letters to a man whose every good quality she had to invent, and who afterwards tortured her with these very letters into a crime which made her stand for months within the shadow of the gallows. She had not patience to await until the real lover came, and then when he did 24 come these fatal letters stood between her and her happiness, and her fair name.

The very instinct which leads to constant letter-writing, goes with a constitutional want of caution, and therefore indicates a necessity for intelligent self-restraint. If young women, when writing letters, would only project themselves into the future and imagine a time when they might be confronted with the lines which they have just penned, many an ill-advised missive would go into the fire instead of into the mail bag. Indeed, if letters at all doubtful in spirit or intent were laid aside until “next morning” many a wrong would be left undone, many a friendship would be preserved unbroken, and many an imprudence be postponed and so uncommitted. If indeed a woman could say truthfully, “This letter is my letter, and if mischief comes of it I alone have the penalty to pay,” expansive correspondence might be less dangerous. But no one can thus limit folly or sin, and its consequence may even touch those who were not even aware of the writing of the letter.

The abuse of letter-writing is one of the 25 greatest trials of the epoch. Distance, which used to be a protection, is now done away with. Every one cries out, and insists upon your listening. They write events while they are only happening. People unknown intrude upon your time and take possession of it. Enmities and friendships thousands of miles away scold or caress; one is exacting, another angry, a third lays upon your conscience obligations which he has invented. For a mere nothing—a yes, or a no—idle, gushing people fire off continual notes and insist upon answers. Now this kind of letter-writing exists only because postage is cheap; if such correspondents had to pay twenty-five cents for giving their opinions, they would not give them at all. It is an impertinence also, for though we may like persons well enough to receive from them a visit, or even to return it, it is a very different thing to be called upon to retire ourselves with pen and ink and note paper, and give away time and interest which we are not inclined to give.

Plenty of girls write very clever letters,—letters that are an echo of their own circle, 26 full of a sweet audacity and an innocent swagger of knowledge of the world and of the human heart that is very engaging. And the temptation to write such letters is very great, especially as both the writer and her friends are apt to imagine them evidence of a large amount of genius. Indeed, some who have a specially bright pen, or else a specially large circle of admirers and flatterers, arrive speedily at the conviction that they can just as easily write a book. So without reason and without results, they get themselves heart-burning and heart-ache and disappointment. For there is absolutely no kindred whatever between this graceful, piquant eloquence du billet and the fancy, observation, and experience necessary to successful novel writing.

If a girl really has a vein of true sentiment, she ought not at this day to give it away in letter-writing. There is a safer and more profitable way to use it; she can now take it to market and sell it for pudding, for the magazines and ladies’ newspapers. Sentiment and fancy have a commercial value; and instead of sealing them up in a two-cent 27 envelope for an acquaintance,—who is likely very unappreciative, and who perhaps tosses them into the fire with a contemptuous adjective,—she might send them to some long-suffering editor. These men know the depths of the girlish heart in this respect, and they have a patience in searching for the gold among the dross that is not generally believed in. Therefore, if a girl must write, let her send her emotions to the newspapers; an editor is a far more prudent confidant than her very dearest friend.

Really, the day for letter-writing is past. As an art it is dead, as convenience it remains; but it has lost all sentiment. Even Madame de Sévigné could not be charming on a postal card, and for genuine information the general idea is to put it into twenty words and send it by telegraph. So, then, it is a good thing for young women to get over, as soon as possible, the tendency of their years to sentimental letter-writing. They will thus save themselves many a heart-ache in the present and many a fear for the future. For if they do not write letters they cannot feel hurt because they are not 28 answered. They cannot worry because they have said something imprudent. They will not make promises, in the exaltation of composition, which they will either break or hate to keep when they are in their sober senses. They will also preserve their friendships longer, for they will not deprive them altogether of that charm which leaves something to the imagination.

Of course there are yet such things as absolutely necessary letters; and these, in their way, ought to be made as perfect as possible. Fortunately, perfection in this respect is easily attainable, its essentials being evident to all as soon as they are stated. First, a letter which demands or deserves the attention of an answer, ought to have it as promptly as if we were paying a bill. Second, we ought to write distinctly, for bad handwriting represents a very dogged, self-asserting temper,—one, too, which is unfair, because if we put forward our criticisms and angularities in a personal meeting, they can be returned in kind, but to send a letter that is almost unintelligible admits of no reprisal but an answer in some equally provoking 29 scrawl. Even if the writing is only careless, and may be read with a little trouble, we have no right to impose that extra trouble. Third, it is a good thing to write short letters. The cases in which people have written long letters, and not been sorry for having done so, are doubtless very rare. No one will ever be worse for just saying plainly what she has to say and then signing her name to it plainly and in full. For a name half signed is not only a vulgarity, it indicates a character unfinished, uncertain, and hesitating.

There is a kind of correspondence which is a special development of our special civilization, and which it is to be hoped will be carefully avoided by the young woman of the future,—that is, the writing of letters begging autographs. A woman who does this thing has a passion which she ought immediately to arrest and compel to give an account of itself.

If she did so, she would quickly discover that it is a mean passion, masquerading in a character it has no right to, and no sympathy with. An autograph beggar is a natural development, though not a very 30 creditable one. She doubtless began her career of accumulation with collecting birds’ eggs in the country, where they could be got for nothing. Butterflies were probably her next ambition. Then perhaps that mysterious craze for postage stamps followed. After such a training, the mania for autographs would come as a matter of course. And the sole and whole motive of the collecting business is nothing at all but the vulgar love of possessing, and especially of possessing what costs nothing.

It is amusing and provoking to notice the air of complaisance with which some of these begging epistles are suffused. The writers seem incapable of conceiving statesmen, artists, and authors who will not be as pleased to give as they are to ask. But in reality, a man or a woman, however distinguished, who feels a request for his or her autograph to be a compliment, is soaked in self-conceit, and the large majority certainly do look upon such requests as simply impertinent begging letters. The request, indeed, carries an affront with it, no matter how civilly it may be worded, as it is not 31 that particular autograph that is wanted, for the beggars generally prefix as an excuse the bare-faced fact that they have already begged hundreds. Certainly no self-respecting woman will care to put herself among the host of these contemptible seekers after a scrap of paper.

Speaking broadly, a woman’s character may be in many respects fairly gauged by her habits on the subject of letter-writing; as fairly, indeed, as we may gauge a man’s by his methods of dealing with money. If we know how a man gets money, how he spends it, how he lends it, borrows it, or saves it, we have a perfect measurement for his temper and capabilities. And if we know how a woman deals with her letters, how many she gets, how many she sends, how long or how short they are, if they are sprawly and untidy, or neat and cleanly, and how they are signed and sealed, then we can judge her nature very fairly, for she has written herself down in an open book, and all who wish may read her.

32

Flirts and Flirtation

Flirting is the product of a highly civilized state of society. People in savage, or even illiterate life have no conception of its delicate and indefinable diplomacy. A savage sees a woman “that pleases him well,” pays the necessary price for her, and is done with the affair. Jane in the kitchen and John in the field look and love, tell each other the reason why, and get married. “Keeping company,” which is their nearest approach to flirtation, has a definite and well-understood end in view, the approaches to which are unequivocal and admit of no other translation.

Flirts are of many kinds. There is the quiet, “still-water” flirt, who leads her captives by tender little sighs and pretty, humble, beseeching ways; who hangs on every word a man says, asks his advice, his 33 advice only, because it is so much better than any one else’s. That is her form of the art, and a very effective one it is.

Again, the flirt is demonstrative and daring. She tempts, dazzles, tantalizes her victims by the very boldness with which she approaches that narrow but deep Rubicon dividing flirting from indiscretion. But she seldom crosses it; up to a certain point she advances without hesitation, but at once there is a dead halt, and the flirtee finds that he has been taken a fool’s journey.

There are sentimental flirts, sly little pusses, full of sweet confidences and small secrets, and who delight in asking the most suggestive and seductive questions. “Does Willy really believe in love marriages?” or, “Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?” etc.

Intellectual flirts hover about young poets and writers, or haunt studios and libraries, and doubtless are delightfully distracting to the young ideas shooting in those places.

Everybody knows a variety of the religious flirt,—those demure lilies of the ecclesiastical garden, that grow in the pleasant 34 paths where pious young rectors and eligible saints walk. Perhaps, as their form of flirting takes the shape of votive offerings, district visiting, and choir singing, their perpetual gush of sentiment and hero-worship is advantageous, on the principle that it is an ill wind that blows nobody good.

All of these female varieties have their counterparts among male flirts, and besides, there are some masculine types flagrantly and universally common. Such is the bold, handsome bird of prey, who advances just far enough to raise expectation and then suddenly retires. Or the men who are always insinuating, but who never make an honest declaration; who raise vague hopes with admirable skill and poetic backgrounds, and keep women madly and hopefully in love with them by looks and gestures they never give an interpretation to. When they are tired they retire slowly, without quarrel, without explanation; they simply allow their implied promises to die of neglect.

Then there is the prudent flirt, who trifles only with married women; dangles after those subtle, handsome creatures who affect 35 blighted lives and uncomfortable husbands, and who, having married for convenience, are flirting for love. Such women are safe entertainment for the cowardly male flirt, who fears a flirtation that leads perchance to matrimony, but who has no fears about his liability to commit bigamy. There are “fatherly” male flirts, and “brotherly” and “friendly” flirts, but the title is nothing but an agreed-upon centre of operations.

Yet it is difficult to imagine how, in a polished state of society, flirting could be done without. Some sort of preliminary examination into tastes, disposition, and acquirements is necessary before matrimony, and a woman cannot carry a list of her desirable qualities, nor a man advertise his temper and his income. The trouble is that no definite line can be drawn, no scale of moral values can decide where flirting ends and serious attentions begin; and society never agrees as to what is innocent and what reprehensible.

There are ill-natured people who call every bright, merry girl that is a favorite with gentlemen, that talks, sings, and dances 36 well, a “terrible flirt;” who admit nothing as propriety but what is conventionally correct and insipid. The media of flirting are indeed endless; a clever woman can find in simply listening a method of conveying the most delicate flattery and covert admiration. Indeed, flirting in its highest quality is an art requiring the greatest amount of tact and skill, and women who would flirt and be blameless, no matter how vast their materials, must follow Opie’s plan and “mix them with brains.”

It used to be a maxim that no gentleman could be refused by a lady, because he would never presume beyond the line of her encouragement; therefore it is to be presumed, on this rule, no lady advances further than she is willing to ratify. But such a state of society would be very stupid and formal, and we should miss a very piquant flavor in life, which even very good and great people have not been able to resist.

Upon this rule we must convict Queen Elizabeth as an arrant flirt, and “no lady;” we should be compelled to shake our heads at the fair Thrale and the great Dr. Johnson, 37 at naughty Horace Walpole and Mrs. Hannah More, and to even look with suspicion on George Whitefield and “good Lady Huntingdon.”

No, in polished society flirting in a moderate form is an amusement, and an investigation so eminently suited to the present condition of the sexes that a much better one could be better spared. In one case only does it admit of no extenuating circumstances,—that of the married flirt of both sexes.

A flirt may not indeed be an altogether lovely character, even with all her alluring faults; but she is something a great deal nicer than a prude. All men prefer a woman who trusts them, or gayly challenges them to a combat, in which she proposes their capture, to her who affects horror at masculine tastes and ways, and is always expecting them to do some improper, or say some dreadful, thing. Depend upon it, if all the flirts were turned into prudes, society would have gone further to fare worse.

38

On Falling in Love

“Something there is moves me to love; and I

Do know I love, but know not how, or why.”

There is in love no “wherefore;” and we scarcely expect it. The working-world around must indeed give us an account of their actions, but lovers are not worth much in the way of rendering a reason; for half the charm of love-making lies in the defiance of everything that is reasonable, in asserting the incredible, and in believing the impossible. And surely we may afford ourselves this little bit of glamour in an age judging everything by the unconditional and the positive; we may make little escapades into love-land, when all the old wonder-lands, from the equator to the pole, are being mapped out, and dotted over with railway depots, and ports of entry.

Falling in love is an eminently impractical piece of business, and yet Nature—who is 39 no blunderer—generally introduces the boy and girl into active adult life by this very door. In the depths of this delicious foolishness the boyish heart grows to the measure of manhood; bats and boats and “fellows” are forever deposed, and lovely woman reigns in their stead. To boys, first love is, perhaps, more of an event than to girls, for the latter have become familiar with the routine of love-making long before they are seriously in love. They sing about it in connection with flowers and angels and the moon; they read Moore and Tennyson; they have perhaps been the confidants of elder sisters. They are waiting for their lover, and even inclined to be critical; but the first love of a boy is generally a surprise—he is taken unawares, and surrenders at discretion.

Perhaps it is a good stimulant to faith in general, that in the very outset of it we should believe in such an unreasonable and wonderful thing as first love. Tertullian held some portions of his faith simply “because they were impossible.” It is no bad thing for a man to begin life with a grand passion,—to imagine that no one ever loved 40 before him, and that no one who comes after him will ever love to the same degree that he does.

This absolute passion, however, is not nearly so common as it might well be; and Rochefoucauld was not far wrong when he compared it to the ghosts that every one talks about, but very few see. It generally arises out of extreme conditions of circumstances or feelings; its food is contradiction and despair. It is doubtful if Romeo and Juliet would have cared much for each other if the Montagues and Capulets had been friends and allies, and the marriage of their children a necessary State arrangement; and Byron is supported by all reasonable evidence when he doubtfully inquires:

“If Laura, think you, had been Petrarch’s wife,

Would he have written sonnets all his life?”

This excessive passion does not thrive well either in a high state of civilization. “King Cophetua and the Beggar-maid” is the ballad of an age when love really “ruled the court, the camp, the grove.” The nineteenth century is not such an age. At the very 41 best, King Cophetua would now do pretty much as the judge did with regard to Maud Muller. Still no one durst say that even in such a case it was not better to have loved and relinquished than never to have loved at all.

“Better for all that some sweet hope lies

Deeply buried from human eyes.”

How can love be the be-all and the end-all of life with us, when steam-looms and litigation, railway shares and big bonanzas, cotton and corn, literature and art, politics and dry goods, and a thousand other interests share our affections and attentions? It is impossible that our life should be the mere machinery of a love plot; it is rather a drama in which love is simply one of the dramatis personæ.

This fact is well understood, even if not acknowledged in words; the sighs and the fevers, the hoarding of flowers and gloves, the broken hearts and shattered lives, all for the sake of one sweet face, still exist in literature, but not much in life. Lovers of to-day are more given to considering how to 42 make housekeeping as easy as matrimony than to writing sonnets to their mistresses’ eyebrows. The very devotion of ancient times would now be tedious, its long protestations a bore, and we lovers of the nineteenth century would be very apt to yawn in the very face of a sixteenth-century Cupid. Let the modern lover try one of Amadis’ long speeches to his lady, and she would likely answer, “Don’t be tiresome, Jack; let us go to Thomas’ and hear the music and eat an ice-cream.”

Is love, then, in a state of decay? By no means—it has merely accommodated itself to the spirit of the age; and this spirit demands that the lives of men shall be more affected by Hymen than by Cupid. Lovers interest society now solely as possible husbands and wives, fathers and mothers of the republic. Lord Lytton points out this fact as forcibly exemplified in our national dramas. Every one feels the love scenes in a play, the sentimental dialogues of the lovers, fatiguing; but a matrimonial quarrel excites the whole audience, and it sheds its pleasantest tears over their reconciliation. 43 For few persons in any audience ever have made, or ever will make, love as poets do; but the majority have had, or will have, quarrels and reconciliations with their wives.

“Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them—but not for love;” and if this was true of Shakespeare’s times, it is doubly so of ours. If there ever was any merit in dying for love, we fail to see it; occasionally a man will wildly admit that he is making a fool of himself for this or that woman, but though we may pity him, we don’t respect him for such a course. Women, still more rarely than men, “make fools of themselves” on this score; and in spite of all poets assert to the contrary, they are eminently reasonable, and their affections bear transplanting.

In other respects we quite ignore the inflation of old love terms. “Our fate,” “our destiny,” etc., resolve themselves into the simplest and most natural of events; a chat on a rainy afternoon, a walk home in the moonlight, mere contiguity for a season, are the agents which often decide our love affairs. And yet, below all this, lies that inexplicable 44 something which seems to place this bit of our lives beyond our wisest thoughts. We can’t fall in love to order, and all our reasoning on the subject resolves itself into a conviction that under certain inexplicable conditions, “it is possible for anybody to fall in love with anybody else.”

Perhaps this is a part of what Artemus Ward calls the “cussedness” of things in general; but at any rate we must admit that if “like attracts like,” it attracts unlike too. The scholar marries the foolish beauty; the beauty marries an ugly man, and admires him. Poverty intensifies itself by marrying poverty; plenty grows plethoric by marrying wealth. But how far love is to blame for these strange attractions, who can tell? Probably a great deal that passes for love is only reflected self-love, the passion to acquire what is generally admired or desired. Thus beautiful women are often married as the most decorous way of gratifying male vanity. A pleasant anecdote, as the Scotch say, anent this view, is told of the Duc de Guise, who after a long courtship prevailed on a celebrated beauty to grant him her hand. The 45 lady observing him very restless, asked what ailed him. “Ah, madame,” answered the lover, “I ought to have been off long ago to communicate my good fortune to all my friends.”

But the motives and influences that go to make up so highly complex an emotion as love are beyond even indication, though the subject has been a tempting one to most philosophical writers. Even Comte descends from the positive and unconditional to deify the charmingly erratic feminine principle; Michelet, after forty volumes of history, rests and restores himself by penning a book on love; the pale, religious Pascal, terrified at the vastness of his own questions, comforts himself by an analysis of the same passion; and Herbert Spencer has gone con amore into the same subject. But love laughs at philosophy, and delights in making fools of the wise for its sake.

It is easy to construct a theory, but the first touch of a white hand may demolish it; easy to make resolutions, but the first glance of a pair of bright eyes may send them packing. It is easy for men to be philosophers, 46 when they are not lovers; but when once they fall in love there is no distinction then between the fool and the wise man. However, we can be thankful that love no longer demands such outward and visible tokens of slavery as she used to. In this day lovers address their mistresses as women—not goddesses. Indeed we should say now of men who serve women on their knees, “When they get up, they go away.”

47

Engaged To Be Married

“Woo’d and married and a’.

Woo’d and married and a’:

An’ is na she very weel aff

That is woo’d and married and a’?”

It is a beautiful fancy that marriages are ordained in heaven; it is a practical fact that they are made on earth; and that what we call “our destiny,” or “our fate,” is generally the result of favorable opportunities, sympathetic circumstances, or even pleasant contiguity for a season. Hence we always expect after the summer vacation to hear of a number of “engagements.” The news is perennially interesting; we may have seen the parties a thousand times, but their first appearance in their new character excites all our curiosity.

Generally the woman expands and beautifies, rises with the occasion, and puts on new beauty with the confidence of an augmenting 48 wardrobe and an assured position. There is nothing ridiculous in her attitude; her wedding trousseau and marriage presents keep her in a delightful state of triumphant satisfaction, and if she has “done well unto herself,” she feels entitled to the gratitude of her family and the envy of all her female acquaintance.

The case is not so socially pleasant for her accomplice; it is always an awkward thing for a man to announce his engagement. His married friends ask him prosaic questions, and “wish him joy,”—a compliment which of itself implies a doubt; or they tell him he is going to do a wise thing, and treat him in the interval as if he was naturally in a state of semi-lunacy. His bachelor friends receive the news either with a fit of laughter, an expressive, long-drawn whistle, or at best with the assurance that they “consider marriage a good thing, though they are not able to carry out their principles.” But he is soon aware that they regard him virtually as a deserter; they make parties without including him; he drops out of their consultations; he has lost his caste among the order of 49 young men, and has not been admitted among the husbands of the community; he hangs between two states; is not of that, nor yet quite of this.

Naturally enough, there are a variety of opinions on the subject of prolonging or cutting as short as possible this preliminary stage. Those who regard marriage as a kind of commerce, whose clearing house is St. Thomas’s or St. Bartholomew’s, will, of course, prefer to clinch the contemplated arrangement as soon as possible. Their business is intelligible; there is “no nonsense about them;” and, upon the whole, the sooner they get to ordering dinner and paying taxes the better. Many of us have sat waiting in a dentist’s room with a tooth-ache similar to that which made Burns

“Cast the wee stools owre the meikle;”

and some of us have watched for an editor’s decision with feelings which would gladly have annihilated the interval.

But it is not alone the prosaic and the impatient who are averse to a long engagement: the methodical, whose arrangements it tumbles 50 upside down; the busy, whose time it appropriates; the selfish, who are compelled during it to make continual small sacrifices; the shy, who feel as if all the other relations of life had retired into the background in order to exhibit them as “engaged men;” the greedy, who look upon the expected love-offerings as so much tribute money,—these and many other varieties of lovers would gladly simplify matrimony by reducing its preliminaries to a question and a ceremony. Yet if Love is to have anything like the place in life that it has in poetry; if we really believe that marriage ought to be founded on sympathy of tastes and principles; if we have any faith in that mighty ruler of hearts and lives, a genuine love affair,—we shall not wish to dim the glory of marriage by denying it this sojourn in a veritable enchanted land; for in its atmosphere many fine feelings blossom that never would have birth at all if the niceties of courtship were superseded by the levelling rapidity of marriage. If people are really in love they gain more than they lose by a reasonable delay. There is time for the reading and writing 51 of love-letters, one of the sweetest experiences of life; the tongue and pen get familiar with affectionate and noble sentiments; indeed I doubt if there is any finer school for married life than a full course of love-letters. But if the marriage follow immediately on the engagement, all love-letters and all love-making must necessarily have a flavor of furniture and dress, and of “considerations.” I admit that love-making is an unreasonable and impractical piece of business; but in this lies all its charm. It delights in asserting the incredible and believing the impossible. But, after all, it is in the depths of this delicious foolishness that the heart attains its noblest growth. Life may have many grander hopes and calmer joys in store,—

“But there’s nothing half so sweet in life

As Love’s young dream.”

Therefore we ought to look with complaisance, if not with approbation, on young people serenely passing through this phase of their existence; but the fact is, we are apt to regard it as a little trial. Lovers are so 52 happy and self-satisfied that they do not understand why everybody else is not in the same supreme condition. If the house is ever so small, they expect a clear room to themselves.

Yet such an engagement, of reasonable length, is to be advised wherever young people are tender and constant in nature, and really in love with each other. I would only ask them to be as little demonstrative in public as possible, and to carry their happiness meekly, for, in any case, they will make large demands on the love, patience, and toleration of their friends. But perhaps one of the greatest advantages of a prolonged engagement is the security it brings against a mésalliance. Now, to a man a mésalliance is the heaviest weight he can carry through life; but to a woman it is simply destruction.

The best women have an instinctive wish to marry a man superior to themselves in some way or other; for their honor is in their husbands, and their status in society is determined by his. A woman who, for a passing fancy, marries a man in any way her inferior wrongs herself, her family, and her 53 whole life; for the “grossness of his nature” will most probably drag her to his level. Now and then a woman of great force of character may lift her husband upward, but she accepts such a labor at the peril of her own higher life. Should she find it equally impossible to lift him to her level or to sink to his, what remains? Life-long regrets, bitter shame and self-reproach, or a forcible setting of herself free. But the latter, like all severe remedies, carries desperation instead of hope, with it. Never can she quite regain her maiden place; an aura of a doubtful kind fetters and influences her in every effort or relation of her future life.

In the early glamour of a love affair, women do not see these things, but fathers and mothers do; they know that “the world is not well lost for love,” and they have a right to protest against such folly. In an imprudent love affair, every day is so much gained; therefore when this foolishness is bound up in the heart of a youth or a maiden, the best of all plans is to arrange for time,—as long an engagement as possible.

But I will suppose that all my unmarried 54 readers have found proper mates who will stand the test of parental wisdom and a fairly long and exacting engagement, and that after some happy months they will not only be “woo’d,” but “married and a’.” Now begins their real life, and for the woman the first step is renunciation. She must give up with a good grace the exaggeration and romance of love-making, and accept in its place that far better tenderness which is the repose of passion, and which springs from the tranquil depths of a man’s best nature.

The warmest-hearted and most unselfish women soon learn to accept quiet trust and the loyalty of a loving life as the calmest and happiest condition of marriage; and the men who are sensible enough to rely on the good sense of such wives sail round the gushing adorers, both for true affection and comfortable tranquillity.

Just let a young wife remember that her husband necessarily is under a certain amount of bondage all day; that his interests compel him to look pleasant under all circumstances to offend none, to say no hasty word, and she will see that when he reaches his own 55 fireside he wants most of all to have this strain removed to be at ease; but this he cannot be if he is continually afraid of wounding his wife’s sensibilities by forgetting some outward and visible token of his affection for her. Besides, she pays him but a poor compliment in refusing to believe what he does not continually assert; and by fretting for what it is unreasonable to desire she deeply wrongs herself, for—

“A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,

Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.”

56

Shall our Daughters have Dowries?

Those who occupy themselves reading that writing on the wall which we call “signs of the times” may ponder awhile the question which Mr. Messinger puts with such plaintive appeal to the parents of this generation: “Shall our daughters have dowries?” But in the very commencement of his argument he abandons the case he has voluntarily taken up, and enters a plea, not for the daughters, but for the young men who may wish to marry the daughters. Also in urging upon parents the duty of endowing their daughters he seems to have lost sight of the fact that “dowry,” in its very spirit and intention, does not propose to care for the husband, but is solely in the interest of the wife.

He asserts, doubtless with accuracy, that the average income of young men is $1,100 57 a year, and he finds in this fact a sufficient reason for the decrease of marriage among them. It is no reason at all; for a large and sensible proportion of young men do marry and live happily and respectably on $1,100 a year, and those who cannot do so are very clearly portrayed by Mr. Messinger, and very little respected by any sensible young woman.

But it is not to be believed that they form any preponderating or influential part of that army of young men who are the to-morrow of our great republic. Let any reader count, from such young men as are known to him, the number who would divide their $1,100 as Mr. Messinger supposes them to do:—

I venture to say the proportion would be very small indeed.

For the majority of young men know that nothing worth having is lost in the sharing. They meet in their own circle 58 some modest, home-making girl whom they love so truly that they can tell her exactly what their income is, and then they find out that their own ideas of economy were crude and extravagant compared with the wondrous ways and means which reveal themselves to a loving woman’s comprehension of the subject. The Oranges, Rutherford, and every suburb of New York are full of pretty little homes supported without worry, and with infinite happiness, upon $1,100 a year, and perhaps, indeed, upon less money.

The difficulty with the class of young men whose case Mr. Messinger pleads is one deserving of no sympathy. It is a difficulty evoked by vanity and self-conceit, of which Fashion and Mrs. Grundy are the bugbears. Why should a young man capable of making only $1,100 a year expect to marry a girl whose parents are rich enough to guard her “from every wind of heaven, lest it visit her face too roughly”? “Is it fair treatment of the expected husband,” Mr. Messinger asks, that a girl “should be habituated to live without work and then be handed over to her husband with nothing 59 but her clothing and bric-à-brac?” Yes, it is quite fair treatment. If the husband with his $1,100 a year elects to marry a girl not habituated to work, he does it of his own choice: the father of the girl is probably not at all desirous of his alliance; then why should the father deprive himself of the results of his own labor and economy to undo the folly and vanity of the young man’s selection? As for the girl, if she has deliberately preferred her lover to her father, mother, home, and to all the advantages of wealth, she has the desire of her heart. It may be quite fair that she should have this desire, but it may be very unfair that her father, mother, and perhaps her brothers and sisters, should be robbed to make her desire less self-sacrificing to her. For if the young man with his poverty is acceptable to both the daughter and her parents, the latter may be safely trusted to do all that is right in the circumstances.

The most objectionable part of Mr. Messinger’s argument is the servile and mercenary aspect in which it places marriage. “What equality can exist,” he asks, “where one 60 (the man) supplies all the means of subsistence and performs all the labor?” That a husband should provide the means of subsistence is the very Magna Charta of honorable marriage; and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand so accept it. It is the precise point on which all true husbands feel the most keenly sensitive. They want no other man—no matter what his relationship or friendship—to support their wives. And under no circumstances does the husband perform all the labor resulting from a marriage. That he may be a true man, a father and a citizen, it is necessary that he have a home; and in the care of the home, in the bringing-forth and the bringing-up of the family, in the constant demands upon her love and sympathy, the wife performs a never-ceasing multitude of duties that tax her heart and her body in every direction,—a labor of love in comparison with which her husband’s daily routine over his “entries” or his “orders” is a trifling drain of vitality. For a wife and mother must keep every faculty and feeling “at attention;” but a clerk over his ledger keeps a 61 dozen faculties on the premises to do the work of one. And in behalf of all true and trusted wives I deny in totality the idea that they go to their husbands with “painful shrinking” for the money necessary to carry on the mutual home, or that there is in any beloved wife’s heart the most fleeting thought of “dependence.” Mr. Messinger does a great and shameful wrong to the majority of husbands and wives by such an assertion.

Indeed, this gentleman’s experience seems to have been an unusually sad one, nine out of ten of his friends having died in early middle age from the undue expenditure of nerve and vital force in their efforts to provide for their families in what they doubtless considered a suitable manner; and he evidently thinks that if their wives had been dowered this result would probably have been averted. It is extremely improbable. The wife’s small income would far more likely have led to a still more extravagant way of living; for the genius of the American is to live for to-day and take care for the morrow when the morrow comes.

In many respects it is the genius of the 62 age. Old forms of thought and action are in a state of transition. No one can tell what to-morrow may bring forth. The social conditions which inspired the fathers of the past to save for their posterity are passing away; and I speak from knowledge when I assert that they were often conditions of domestic misery and wrong, and that growing children suffered much under them. Suppose a father has two daughters and three sons; must he curtail the daughters in the education and pleasures of their youth, must he limit the three boys at home and at college, in order to give a sum of money to some unknown young man who will doubtless vow that his daughter’s heart and person are more than all the world to him? If she be not more than all the world to him, he has no right to marry her; and if she be, what can be added to a gift so precious?

The tendency of the time is to dishonor marriage in every way; but the deepest wrong, the most degrading element that can be introduced, is to make it dependent upon dowries or any other financial consideration. We must remember also that in England, 63 where dowry has been a custom, it was one not particularly affecting those classes whose daughters are likely to marry clerks upon small salaries. It was the provision made by landed gentry for their daughters, and they exacted in return an equally suitable settlement from the expectant husband. If the father gave a sum of money to the bride, the bridegroom generally gave the dower-house, with the furniture, silver, linen, etc., which would make it a proper home for her widowhood. Many a marriage has been broken off because the bridegroom would not make such settlements as the father considered the dower demanded.

Mr. Messinger acknowledges that the cost of living was never so small as at this day, and that the difficulty in the way of young men marrying is “purely one of insane imitation and competition.” But there is no necessity for this insane competition; and why provide an unusual and special remedy for what is purely optional? Nobody compels the young husband to live as if his income was $11,000 instead of $1,100. Of his own free will he sacrifices his life to his vanity, and 64 there is no justice in attempting his relief by dowering his perhaps equally guilty wife out of the results of another man’s industry and economy.

Dowry is an antiquated provision for daughters, behind the genius of the age, incompatible with the dignity of American men and the intelligence and freedom of American women. Besides, there are very likely to be two, three, four, or more daughters in a house; how could a man of moderate means save for all of them? And what would become of the sons? The father who gives his children a loving, sensible mother, who provides them with a comfortable home, and who educates fully all their special faculties, and teaches them the cunning in their ten fingers, dowers his daughters far better than if he gave them money. He has funded for them a provision that neither a bad husband nor an evil fate can squander. He has done his full duty, and every good girl will thankfully so accept it.

As for the young men who could imagine themselves spending, out of $1,100, $700 65 upon dress and amusements, neither the world, nor any sensible woman in it, will be the worse for their celibacy. For if they take a wife, it will doubtless be some would-be stylish, foolish virgin, whose soft hands are of no earthly use except as ring-stands and glove-stretchers. It is such marriages that are failures. It is in such pretentious homes that love and moderate means cannot live happily together. It is in such weak hands that Pandora’s box shuts, not on hope, but on despair.

The brave, sensible youth does not fear to face life and all its obligations on $1,100 a year. With love it is enough to begin with. Hope, ambition, industry, good fortune, are his sureties for the future. However well educated he may be, he knows that in his own class he will find lovely women equally well educated. They may be teaching, clerking, sewing, but they are his peers. He has no idea of marrying a young lady accustomed to servants and luxury, and the question of dower never occurs to him. The good girl who supplements his industry by her economy, who cheers him with her 66 sympathy, who shares all his thoughts and feelings, and crowns his life with love and consolation, has all the dowry he wants. And this is an opinion founded on a long life of observation,—an opinion that fire cannot burn out of me.

67

The Ring Upon the Finger

Rings were probably the first ornaments ever worn, though in the earliest ages they had a meaning far beyond mere adornment. The stories of Judah and Tamar, of Pharaoh and Joseph, of Ahasuerus and Haman, show that as pledges of good faith, as marks of favor, and as tokens of authority, they were the recognized symbols. The fashion was an Eastern one, for the Jews were familiar with it before their sojourn in Egypt; indeed, it may have been one of those primeval customs which Shem, Ham, and Japhet saved from the wreck of an earlier world. Certainly the people of Syria and the lords of Palestine and Tyre used rings in the earliest times; and it is remarkable that they bore the same emblem which ancient Mexican rings bear,—the constellation of Pisces. As an 68 ornament, however, the ring is least important; it is an emblem. The charmed circle has potency and romance.

Great faith in all ages has been placed in charmed rings. Greeks and Romans possessed them, and the Scandinavian nations had a superstitious faith in such amulets; indeed, as chronicles declare, it is hard to compute how much William was indebted for his victory over Harold to the influence of the ring he wore, which had been blessed and hallowed. As curative agencies, rings have also played a curious part. Until the Georgian era, rings blessed by the King or Queen on Good Friday were thought to control epilepsy and other complaints, and something of this secret power is still acknowledged by the superstitious, who wear around their necks rings or coins that have been blessed. Rings have also been agencies for death, as well as for life. In all ages they have been receptacles for subtle poisons, and thus Hannibal and Demosthenes armed themselves against an extremity of evil fortune.

In the life of the English Queen Elizabeth, 69 rings had an extraordinary importance. She was notified of her ascension to the throne by the presentation of Mary’s ring. The withholding of the ring sent by Essex caused her to die in a passion of remorse and re-awakened affection; and no sooner was the great struggle over than her ring was taken from her scarcely cold finger and flung out of the window to Sir John Harrington, who hastened over the Border with it to the Scottish James.

There are some curious traditions regarding the stones usually set in rings. The ruby or carbuncle was thought to guard against illness. The sapphire was the favorite of churchmen, and was thought to inspire pure desires. Epiphanes says the first tables of the Law were written on sapphires. The emerald bestowed cheerfulness and increased wealth. The opal was said to make a man invisible, the jacinth to procure sleep, and the turquoise to appease quarrels between man and wife. Things are much changed, however, since heathen sages and Rosicrucian alchemists defined the qualities and powers of gems. We have commercial 70 “rings” now, which laugh emerald ones to scorn as means of procuring wealth. If the opal could make a man invisible, it might be popular on the first of a month, but we have better narcotics than the jacinth, while the elaborateness of our women’s toilets gives husbands manifold opportunities of peace-making, quite as successful as the turquoise.

The Jews first used it in marriage. For this purpose they required it to have a certain value, and to be finally and fully purchased. If it was bought on credit, or taken as a gift, its power was destroyed. The Christian Church early adopted the custom of the marriage ring. It was placed first on the thumb, in the name of the “Father;” then removed to the first finger, in the name of the “Son;” to the third with the name of the “Holy Ghost;” and the “Amen” fixed its place on the fourth.

Rings were also the emblem of spiritual marriage and dignity as early as the third century. In the Romish Church the Episcopal ring is of gold set with a rich gem. The Pope has two rings, one bearing the 71 likeness of St. Peter, used for ordinary business; the other bearing a cross, and the heads of both Peter and Paul, and the reigning Pope’s name and arms. It is used only for Bulls, and is broken at the death of the Pontiff; and a new one given by the city of Rome to his successor. These rings of spiritual office were frequently worn on the thumb, and when the tomb of Bede was opened in May, 1831, a large thumb-ring was found where the right hand had fallen to dust.

The ring has been used not only for carnal and spiritual weddings, but also for commercial ones. For six hundred years the Doges of Venice married, with a gold ring, the Adriatic and its rich commerce to their city on the sea. As an emblem of delegated or transmitted power, the ring has also played a remarkable part in human affairs. Pharaoh and Ahasuerus in Biblical records are examples. Alexander transferred his kingdom to Perdicas with his ring. When Cæsar received the head of Pompey, he also received his ring, and when Richard the Second resigned his crown to Henry of 72 Lancaster, he did so by giving him his ring. The coronation ring of England is of gold, in which is set a large violet ruby, carved with the cross of St. George. The custom of engraving sacred emblems upon rings for common wear was angrily reproved by so early a sage as Pythagoras; and this heathen’s delicacy about sacred things is commended to the notice of those women of our own day, who toss the holy symbol of our faith around the toilet tables, and wear it in very unconsecrated places.

However, I have said enough to prove that the ring upon our finger is a link between us and the centuries beyond the flood. We cannot escape this tremendous solidarity of the human race. We are part of all that has been, and the generations that follow us will look back to us and say, “They were our fathers, and we are their heirs, and lo, we are all one!”

73

Flirting Wives

If some good and thoughtful woman who died fifty years ago could return to this world, what in our present life would most astonish her? Would it be the wonders of steam, electricity, and science; the tyranny of the working classes, or the autocracy of servants? No! It would be the amazing development of her own sex,—the preaching, lecturing, political women; the women who are doctors and lawyers; who lose and win money on horses, or in stocks and real estate; the women who talk slang, and think it an accomplishment; who imitate men’s attire and manners; who do their athletic exercises in public; and, perhaps more astonishing than all, the women who make marriage the cloak for much profitable post-nuptial flirtation.

For her own sex engaged in business, she might find excuses or even admiration; and 74 even for the unfeminine girls of the era, she might plead Mrs. Poyser’s opinion, that “the women are made to suit the men.” But for young wives notorious for their flirting and their “followers,” she could have nothing but unqualified scorn and condemnation. For the sentiment demanding absolute fidelity in a wife may be said to have the force of a human instinct; in all ages it has exacted from her an avoidance of the very appearance of evil. Therefore a good woman in the presence of a frivolous flirting wife feels as if a law of nature were being broken before her eyes; since behind the wife stands the possible mother, and the claims of family, race, and caste, as well as of conjugal honor, are all in her keeping.

Without any exaggeration it may be said that wife-errantry is now as common as knight-errantry once was. The young men of to-day have discovered the personal advantage and safety there is in the society of another man’s wife. They transpose an old proverb, and practically say: “Fools marry, and wise men follow their wives.” For, if the husband be only complacent, it is such a 75 safe thing to flirt with a pretty wife. Young girls are dangerous and might lure them into matrimony; but they have no fear of bigamy. They can whisper sweet words to a gay, married flirt; they can walk, and talk, and dance, and ride with her; they can lounge in her dusky drawing-room or in her opera box, and no one will ask them the reason why, or make any suggestion about their “intentions.”

How far this custom affects the morals of the woman is not at first obvious; but we must insist on this recognized premise: “Society has laid down positive rules regarding the modesty of women, and apart from these rules it is hard to believe modesty can exist. For all conventional social laws are founded on principles of good morals and good sense; and to violate them without a sufficient reason destroys nicety of feeling, sweetness of mind, and self-respect.” It is no excuse to say that propriety is old-maidish, and that men like smart women, or that no harm is intended by their flirtations. The question is: Can married women preserve their delicacy of thought and their 76 nobleness of manner; can they be truly loyal to their husbands and to themselves throughout the different phases of a recognized flirtation? It is an impossible thing.

Suppose a beautiful girl to be wooed and won by a man in every way suitable to her desires. She has accepted his love and his name, and vowed to cleave to him, and to him only, till death parts them. The wooing has been mainly done in full dress, at balls and operas, or in hours tingling with the expectancy of such conditions. The aroma of roses, the rustle of silks and laces, the notes of music, the taste of bon-bons and sparkling wines, were the atmosphere; and the days and weeks went by to the sense of flying feet in a ballroom, or to enchanted loiterings in greenhouses, and behind palms and flowers on decorated stairways.

The young wife is unwilling to believe that marriage has other and graver duties. She has been taught to live in the present only, and she is, therefore, cynical and apathetic concerning all things but dress and amusements. The husband has to return to 77 business, which has been somewhat neglected; arrears of duty are to be met. He feels it necessary to attend to the question of supplies; he is, likely, a little embarrassed by the long holiday of wooing and honeymooning, and he would be grateful for some retrenchment and retirement, for the purpose of home-making.

The young wife has no such intentions; she resents and contradicts them on every occasion; and after the first pang of disappointment is over, he finds it the most prudent and comfortable plan to be indifferent to her continued frivolity. He is perhaps even flattered to find her so much admired; perhaps, in his heart, rather thankful to be relieved from the trouble of admiring her. As for any graver thoughts, he concludes that his wife is no worse than A’s and B’s and C’s wives; that she is quite able to take care of herself, and that in a multitude of adorers there is safety.

Thus, in a majority of cases, begins the career of the married flirt. But the character is not a corollary of marriage, if the proper conditions were present when the wife was 78 a young woman. There is no salvation in the Order of Matrimony; no miracles are wrought at the altar of Grace Church, or at St. Thomas’s. She that is frivolous, giddy, and selfish is likely to continue frivolous, giddy, and selfish; and marriage merely supplies her with a wider field and greater opportunities for the indulgence of her vanity and greed.

She re-enters society with every advantage of youth, beauty, wealth, and liberty; released from the disabilities under which unmarried girls lie; armed with new powers to dazzle and to conquer. No longer a competitor for a matrimonial prize, she is a rival ten times more dangerous than she was. Setting aside the wrong done to the sacredness of the connubial relation, she now becomes the most subtle enemy to the prospects of all the unmarried girls in her set. What is the bud to the perfect rose? The timid, blushing maiden pales and subsides before the married siren who has the audacity and charm of a conscious intelligence. It is not without good reason that special balls and parties have come into 79 fashion for social buds; they are the necessary sequence to the predominance of married sirens, with whom in a mixed society no young girl can cope. They have the floor and the partners; they monopolize all the attention, and their pleasure is of the greatest importance. And their pleasure is to flirt—to flirt in all places and at all hours.

In vain will some young aspirant to marriage display in the presence of the married flirt her pretty accomplishments. She may sing her songs, and play her mandolin never so sweetly, but the young men slip away with some one or other of the piquant brides of the past year. And in the privacy of the smoking-room it is the brides, and not the young girls, who are talked about—what dresses they wear or are likely to wear, how their hair is done, the history of the jewels which adorn them, and the clever things they have said or implied.

Before we condemn too much the society girls of the time, we ought to consider the new enemy who stands in the way of their advancement to marriage. Is it not quite natural that the most courageous girls should 80 refuse the secondary place to which married flirts assign them, and endeavor to meet these invaders with their own weapons? If so, much of the forwardness of the present young girl is traceable to the necessity forced upon her by these married competitors. For it is a fact that young men go to the latter for advice and sympathy. They tell them about the girls they like, and their fancies are nipped in the bud. For the married flirt’s first instinct is to divest all other women of that air of romance with which the nobility and chivalry of men have invested womanhood for centuries. So she points out with a pitiless exactness all the small arts which other women use; and is not only a rival to some young girl, but a traitor to her whole sex.

And yet she is not only tolerated but indulged. People giving entertainments know that their success will be in a large measure dependent upon the number of beautiful young wives present. They know the situation is all wrong, but they are sure they cannot either fight the wrong, or put it right; and in the meantime their particular 81 ball will not increase the evil very much. Not fifty years ago it was the young beauties that were considered and looked after, and the gentlemen asked to an entertainment were asked with reference to the unmarried girls; for it was understood that any married women present would, of course, be wrapped up in their own husbands. Then a wife accepting attentions from one young man after another would have aroused the contempt and disapproval of every man and woman present.

Vanity in the first place leads young wives to flirting, but grosser motives soon follow. For whatever other experiences matrimony brings, it generally stimulates a woman’s love of money; and the married siren soon makes her “followers” understand that she is “a very practical little woman, and does not care for a sonnet, or a serenade, or a bouquet of fresh flowers.” A summer’s cruise in a fine yacht, a seat on a coach, an opera box, a jewel, dinners, drives, and luncheons, are the blackmail which the married flirt expects, in return for her sighs, sentiment, and advice.

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It is indeed curious to note the change of fashion in this respect. Let any one turn over the novels of half a century ago, and he will see that the favorite plan for compromising a woman’s honor was to induce her to accept the loan of money, or the gift of jewels. If the unfortunate heroine did so, no novelist would have dared to offer an apology for her. But this age of luxury and laxity has exploded the scrupulous delicacy of the Evelinas and Cecilias of the old tales, and the splendidly free feminine Uhlans of our modern society laugh to scorn the prim modesty of the Richardsonian standard. They assert, if not in words yet by their actions, the right of a woman to make her fascinations serviceable to her.

Some married women contend that their flirtations are absolutely innocent friendships. But in all stations of society it is a dangerous thing for two people of the opposite sex to chant together the litany of the church of Plato. The two who could do it safely would be the very two who would never dream of such an imprudence. Those who enter into “friendships” of this kind, with 83 what they think are the most innocent intentions, should sharply arrest themselves as soon as they are “talked about.” For in social judgments, the dictum that “people talked about generally get what they deserve” is true, however unjust it may appear to be.

Another class of married flirts scorn to make any apology, or any pretence of mere friendship. They stand upon the emancipation of women, and the right of one sex to as much liberty as the other. This kind of siren boldly says, “she does not intend to be a slave like her mother, and her grand-mother. She does not propose to tie herself, either to a house or a cradle.” She travels, she lives in yachts and hotels, and she does not include a nursery in her plans. She talks of elective affinities, natural emotions of the heart, and contrasts the opportunities of such conditions with the limitations and the monotony of domestic relations. She makes herself valueless for the very highest natural duties of womanhood, and then talks of her enfranchisement! Yes, she has her freedom, and what does it mean? 84 More dresses and jewelry, more visits and journeys; while the whole world of parental duties and domestic tendernesses lies in ruins at her feet.

The relegation of the married flirt to her proper sphere and duties is beyond the power of any single individual. Society could make the necessary protest, but it does not; for if Society is anything, it is non-interfering. It looks well to it that the outside, the general public appearance of its members is respectable; with faults not found out it does not trouble itself. A charge must be definitely made before it feels any necessity to take cognizance of it. And Society knows well that these married sirens draw like magnets. Besides, each entertainer declares: “I am not my sister’s keeper, nor am I her Inquisitor or Confessor. If her husband tolerates the pretty woman’s vagaries, what right have I, what right has any one, to say a word about her?”

But it is a fact that, if Society frowned on wives who arrogate to themselves the privileges both of young girls and of wives, the 85 custom would become stale and offensive. If it would cease to recognize young married women who are on the terms with their husbands described by Millamant in “The Way of the World,”—“as strange as if they had been married a long time, and as well bred as if they had never been married at all,”—young married women would behave themselves better. It is generally thought that Mr. Congreve wrote his plays for a very dissolute age; in reality, they seem to have been written for a decorous, rather strait-laced generation, if we compare it with our own.

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Mothers-in-Law

Mothers-in-Law are the mothers for whom there is no law, no justice, no sympathy, nor yet that share of fair play which an average American is willing to grant, even to an open adversary. Every petty punster, every silly witling, considers them as a ready-made joke; and the wonder and the pity of it is that abuse so unmerited and so long continued has called forth no champions from that sex which owes so much to woman, in every relation of life.

The condition of mother-in-law is one full of pathos and self-abnegation, and all the reproach attached to it comes from those whose selfishness and egotism ought to render their testimony of small value. A young man, for instance, falls in love with a girl who appears to him the sum of all perfections,—perfections, partly inherited from, 87 and partly cultivated by, the mother at whose side she has lived for twenty years. She is the delight of her mother’s heart, she fills all her hopes and dreams for the future; and the girl herself, believes that nothing can separate her from a mother so dear and so devoted.

While the man is wooing the daughter, this wondrous capability for an absorbing affection strikes him as a very pretty thing. In the first place, it keeps the mother on his side; in the second, he looks forward to supplying this capability with a strictly personal object. At this stage his future mother-in-law is a very pleasant person, for he is uncomfortably conscious of the Beloved One’s father and brothers. He is then thankful for any encouragement she may give him. He gladly takes counsel with her; flatters her opinions, makes her presents, and so works upon her womanly instincts concerning love affairs that she stands by his side when he has to “speak to papa,” and through her favor and tact the rough places are made smooth, and the crooked places plain. Until the marriage 88 is over, and the longed-for girl his wife, there is no one so important in the lover’s eyes as the girl’s mother.

Suddenly all is changed. When the young people return from the bridal trip there is a different tone and a different atmosphere. The young husband is now in his own house, and spreading himself like a peacock in full feather. He thinks “mamma” too interfering. He resents the familiarity with which she speaks to his wife. He feels as if her speculation about their future movements was an impertinence. He says without a blush that her visit was “a bore.” And the bride, being flattered by his desire for no company but her own, admits that “dear mamma is fussy and effusive.” Both have forgotten the days in which the young husband was a great deal of a bore to his mother-in-law,—when indeed it was very hard for her to tolerate his presence; and both have forgotten how she, to secure their happiness, sacrificed her own wishes and prejudices.

How often does this poor mother go to see her child before she realizes she is a bore? 89 How many snubs and heart-aches does she bear ere she comprehends the position? She hopes against despair. She weeps, and wipes her tears away; she tries again, only to be again wounded. Her own husband frets a little with her, and then with a touch of anger at his ungrateful child, advises the mother “to let her alone.” But by and by there is a baby, and she can no longer keep away. She has a world of loving cares about the child and its mother. She is sure no one can take her place now. She is very much mistaken. The baby is a new kind of baby; there has never been one quite such a perfect pattern before; and the parents—exalted above measure at the perfection they alone are responsible for—regard her pride and delight as some infringement of their new honors and responsibilities. Happiness has only hardened them; and after a little, the mother and the mother-in-law understands her loss, and humbly refrains from interfering. Or, if she has an imprudent tongue, she speaks unadvisedly with it, and her words bite home, and the “mother” is forgotten, and the “in-law” remains, to 90 barb every ill-natured word and account for every selfish unkindness.

Of course, in a relationship which admits of endless varieties, this description fits only a certain number. But it is a very large number; for there are few families who will not be able to recall some such case among their members or their acquaintances. Still, many daughters do more virtuously, and cherish a loyal affection for their old home. If they are wise and loving and specially unselfish, they will likely carry their matrimonial bark safely through those narrow shallows which separate the two households. But the trouble is that newly married people are both selfish and foolish. They feel themselves to be the only persons of consequence, and think that all things ought to be arranged for their pleasure. The solemn majesty of the young wife’s housekeeping is not to be criticised, qualified, or inspected; the new-made householder does not believe that the “earth is the Lord’s,” or even the children of men’s; it is all his own. And their friends tacitly agree to smile at this egotism awhile, because all the world really 91 does love a lover; and every one is willing to grant the bride and bridegroom some short respite from the dreary cares and every-day business of life.

Two points are remarkable in this persistent antagonism to the mother-in-law. The first is that the husband who is often specially vindictive against his wife’s mother has very little to say against her male relatives. If the girl he marries is motherless, he does not quarrel with his father-in-law; though he may be quite as interfering as any mother-in-law could be. Yet if the girl, instead of being motherless, is fatherless, the husband at once begins to show his love for his wife by a systematic disrespect towards her mother. Yet perhaps a month previously he had considered her a very amiable lady, he had shown her many courtesies, he had asked her advice about all the details of his marriage. What makes him, a little later, accuse her of every domestic fault? How is it that she has suddenly become “so self-opinionated”? Never before had he discovered that she treats his wife like a child, and himself as an appendage. And how 92 does he manage to make his bride also feel that “dear mamma is trying, and so unable to understand things.” It is a mystery that ends, however, in the mother-in-law being made to feel that her new relative totally disapproves of her. The truth is, the lover was afraid of the men of his wife’s family before marriage. They might seriously have interfered with his intentions. After marriage he knows they will be civil to him for the sake of his wife. Then, the women of the family were useful to him before marriage, after it he can do without them. He has got the woman he was so eager to get by any means, and he wishes to have her entirely. A smile, or a word, or an act of kindness to any one else, is so much taken from his rights. He desires not only to usurp her present and her future, but also her past.

The other remarkable point is the unjust shifting of all the mother-in-law’s shortcomings to the shoulders of the wife’s mother; this is especially unjust, because not only the newspapers of the day, but also the private knowledge of every individual, furnishes abundant testimony that it is not the wife’s 93 mother, but the husband’s mother, who is at the bottom of nine-tenths of the domestic misery arising from this source. The wife’s mother with small encouragement will like, even love, the man who has chosen her daughter above all other women. The husband’s mother never really likes her son’s wife. And young wives are apt to forget how bitterly hard it is for a mother to give her son up, at once and forever, to a girl whom she does not like in any way. Perhaps hitherto the son and mother have been every one, and everything to each other, and it is only human that the latter should have to battle fiercely and constantly with an involuntary jealousy, and a cruel quicksightedness for small faults in his wife. It is only human that she should try to make trouble, and enjoy the fact that her son is less happy with his wife than he was with her, and that he comes to her for comfort in his disappointment. The love of a mother is often a very jealous love; and a jealous mother is just as unreasonable as a jealous wife; she can make life bitterly hard for her son’s wife, and, to do her justice, she very often 94 does so. Then if the wife—wounded and imprudent—goes to her own mother with her sorrows and wrongs, it is the natural attitude of the husband to shift the blame from his own mother to his wife’s mother. There are indeed so many ways by which this misery can enter a household that it is impossible to define them; for there is just variety enough in every case to give an individuality of suffering to each.

What, then, is to be done? Let us admit at once that our relations do give us half the pain and sorrow we suffer in life; but each may do something to reduce the liability. We may remember that all such quarrels come from excess of love, and that a quarrel springing from love is more hopeful than one springing from hate. As mothers-in-law, we may tell ourselves that when our children are married we no longer have the first right in them. The young people must be left to make the best of their life, and we must never interfere, nor ever give advice until it is asked for. Another irritation, little suspected, is the palpable forcing forward of the new relationship. On both 95 sides it is well to be in no hurry to claim it. A girl takes a man for better or for worse, but does not therefore take all his relations. Love for her husband does not include admiration for all within his kindred; nor will it, until the millennium makes all tempers perfect. And, again, a man does not like to be dragooned into a filial feeling for his wife’s family. Many a man would like his new relatives better if they left him with a sense of perfect freedom in the matter.

The main point is that men should put a stop to a traditional abuse that affects every woman in every household. They can do it! Many an honest, manly fellow would burn with shame if he would only consider how often he has not only permitted, but also joined in, the silly, unjust laughter which miserable punsters and negro minstrels and disappointed lovers and other incapables fling at the women of his own household. For if a man is married, or ever hopes to be married, his own mother is, or must be, a mother-in-law. If he has sisters their destiny will likely put them in the 96 same position. The fairest young bride has the prospect before her; the baby daughter in the cradle may live to think her own mother a bore, or to think some other mother one, if there is not a better understanding about a relationship which is far indeed from being a laughable one. On the contrary, the initiation to it is generally a sacrifice, made with infinite heart-ache and anxiety, and with many sorrowful tears.

In the theatres, in the little circles of which every man’s home is the centre, in all places where thoughtless fools turn women and motherhood into ridicule, it is in the power of two or three good men to make the habit derogatory and unfashionable. They can cease to laugh at the wretched little jokes, and treat with contempt the vulgar spirit that repeats them. For the men who say bitter things about mothers-in-law are either selfish egotists, who have called trouble to themselves from this source, or they are moral imbeciles, repeating like parrots fatuous jests whose meaning and wickedness they do not even understand.

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Good and Bad Mothers

The difference between good and bad mothers is so vast and so far-reaching that it is no exaggeration to say that the good mothers of this generation are building the homes of the next generation, and that the bad mothers are building the prisons. For out of families nations are made; and if the father be the head and the hands of a family, the mother is the heart. No office in the world is so honorable as hers, no priesthood so holy, no influence so sweet and strong and lasting.

For this tremendous responsibility mother-love has always been sufficient. The most ignorant women have trusted to it; and the most learned have found it potential when all their theories failed. And neither sage men nor wise women will ever devise anything to take the place of mother-love in 98 the rearing of children. If there be other good things present, it glorifies them; if there be no other good thing—it is sufficient. For mother-love is the spirit of self-sacrifice even unto death, and self-sacrifice is the meat and drink of all true and pure affection.

Still, this momentous condition supposes some central influence, some obligation on the child’s part which will reciprocate it; and this central influence is found to be in obedience. There was once a child in Jewry who was called “wonderful,” and yet the most significant fact recorded of his boyhood is that he “was subject unto his parents.” Indeed nothing else is told of the child, and we are left to conclude that in the pregnant fact of his boyish obedience lay the secret of his future perfect manhood. Unselfish love in the mother! cheerful obedience in the children! in whatever home these forces are constantly operative, that home cannot be a failure. And mother-love is not of the right kind, nor of the highest trend, unless it compels this obedience.

The assertion that affectionate firmness 99 and even wholesome chastisement is unnecessary with our advanced civilization is a specious and dangerous one. The children of to-day have as many rudimentary vices as they had in the days of the patriarchs; as a general thing they are self-willed and inclined to evil from their cradles; greedy without a blush, and ready to lie as soon as they discover the use of language. A good mother does not shut her eyes to these facts; she accepts her child as imperfect, and trains it with never-ceasing love and care for its highest duties. She does not call impudence “smartness,” nor insubordination “high spirit,” nor selfishness “knowing how to take care of itself,” nor lying and dishonesty “sharpness.” She knows, if the child is to be father to the man, what kind of a man such a child will make.

How to manage young children; how to strengthen them physically; how best to awaken their intellects, engage their affections, and win their confidence; how to make home the sweetest spot on earth, a place of love, order, and repose, a temple of purity where innocence is respected, and where no 100 one is permitted to talk of indecent subjects or to read indecent books,—these are the duties of a good mother; and her position, if so filled, is one of dignity and grave importance. For it is on the hearthstone she gives the fine healthy initial touch to her sons and daughters that is not effaced through life, and that makes them blessed in their generation.

There is another duty, a very sacred one, which some mothers, however good in all other respects, either thoughtlessly or with mistaken ideas, delegate to others, the religious training of their children. No Sunday-school and no church can do it for them. The child that learns “Our Father” at its mother’s knee, that hears from mother’s lips the heroic and tender stories of the Bible, has a wellspring of religious faith in his soul that no after life, however hard and fast and destructive, can dry up. It is inconceivable, then, how a mother can permit any other woman to deprive her of an influence over her children nothing can destroy; of a memory in their lives so sweet that when every other memory is withered and approaching decay, it will still be fresh 101 and green,—yes, even to the grave’s mouth. Family! Country! Humanity! these three, but the greatest of the three is Family; and the heart of the family is the good mother. Happy the children who have one! With them

“faith in womankind

Beats with their blood, and trust in all things high

Comes easy to them.”

But if the grand essential to a good mother be self-denying, self-effacing love, this is a bad era for its development. Selfishness and self-seeking is the spirit of the time, and its chilling poison has infected womanhood, and touched even the sacred principle of maternity. In some women it assumes the form of a duty. They feel their own mental culture to be of supreme importance; they wish to attend lectures, and take lessons, and give themselves to some special study. Or the enslaved condition of their own sex troubles them; they bear on their minds the oppressed shop-girls of America, or the secluded odalisques in some Eastern seraglio, or they have ecclesiastic proclivities and take the chair at church meetings, or political 102 ones, and deliver lectures before their special club on women’s disabilities. In these and many other ways they put the natural mission of womanhood aside as an animal instinct, not conducive to their mental development.

Now, no one will object to women’s devoting themselves to works of religion and charity; but this devotion should come before marriage. If they have assumed the position of wifehood, it is a monstrous thing to hold themselves degraded by its consequences, or to consider the care of children a waste of their own life. The world can do without learned women, but it cannot do without good wives and mothers; and when married women prefer to be social ornaments and intellectual amateurs, they may be called philanthropists and scholars, but they are nevertheless moral failures, and bad mothers.

Society has put maternity out of fashion also, and considering the average society woman, it is perhaps just as well. No children are more forlorn and more to be pitied than the waifs of the woman whose life is 103 given up to what she calls “pleasure.” Humbler-born babies are nursed at their mother’s breast and cradled in her loving arms. She teaches them to walk and to read. In all their pain she soothes them; in all their joys she has a part; in all their wrongs “mother” is an ever-present help and comforter. The child of the fashionable woman is too often committed at once to the care of some stranger, who for a few dollars a month is expected to perform the mother’s duty for her. If it does not suck the vitiated, probably diseased, milk of some peasant, it has the bottle and india-rubber mouthpiece, when the woman in charge chooses to give it. But she is often in a temper, or sleepy, or the milk is not prepared, or she is in the midst of a comfortable gossip, or she is dressing or feeding herself, and it is not to be expected she will put any sixteen-dollar-a month baby before her own comfort or pleasure.

The child cannot complain of hunger, it can only cry, and very likely may be struck for crying. What these neglected little ones suffer from thirst is a matter painful to inquire 104 into. The nurse, accustomed to drink her tea and her beer at all hours, does not, herself patronize cold water, and she never imagines the child needs it. Many a baby, after being tortured for hours with a feverish, consuming thirst, passes into the doctor’s hands before the trouble is recognized. But if the child’s own mother had been nursing it she would not have been long in finding out the cause of its impatient, urgent fretfulness.

Let any tender-hearted woman go into the parks and watch one of these unhappy children in the care of its nurse. The hot sun beats down on the small upturned face, and the ignorant creature in charge goes on with her flirtation, or her gossip, or her novel. The child may be at shrieking point from lying long in one position, but there is no one to comprehend its necessity. During those awful hours in which its teeth force their way through hot and swollen gums—hours which would bring from adults unwritable exclamations—the forsaken little sufferer is at the mercy of some sleepy, self-indulgent woman, who has no love for it. Why, indeed, should she? If it were 105 a matter of catechism, how many educated women would be capable of nursing good-naturedly for weeks a fretful, sick child not their own?

As for these neglected babies of pleasure-seeking women, they suffer terribly, but then their mothers are having what they consider a perfectly lovely time, posing at the opera or gyrating in some ballroom, exquisitely dressed, and laughing as lightly as if there were no painful echoes from their neglected nurseries. For no nurse is apt to complain of her baby, she knows her business and her interest too well for that; she prefers to speak comfortable words, and vows the “little darling grows better and better every hour, God bless it!” and, so assured, the mother goes airily away, telling herself that her nurse is a perfect treasure. Whatever other nurses may do, she knows that her nurse is reliable. The fact is that, even where there are children in a nursery able to complain of the wrongs and cruelties they have to endure, they very seldom dare to do so. Mamma is a dear, beautiful lady, very far off; nurse is an ever-present power, capable of 106 making them suffer still more. And mamma does not like to hear tales, she always appears annoyed at anything against nurse. They look into their mother’s face with eyes full of their sad story, if she only had the heart to understand; but they dare not speak, and very soon they are remanded back to their cruel keeper with a kiss, and an injunction to “be good, and do as nurse tells them.”

Consider the women to whom this class of mothers delegate their high office,—an office for which hardly any love or wisdom is sufficient. It would scarcely be possible in the whole world to find any persons more unfit for it. Taking this class as a whole, these very mothers are never tired of expatiating upon its gross immorality, deceitfulness, greed, and dishonesty; yet they do not hesitate to leave the very lives of their children in the charge of these women, whose first lessons to them are lying and deceit. It is a hideous system, and how hideous must that life called “pleasure” be that can thus put aside love, reason, conscience, and break to pieces a natural law so strong that in its 107 purity it frequently proves more powerful than the law of self-preservation. Writing on this subject, Frederick James Grant, F. R. C. S., in his bold and original book, “From Our Dead Selves,” tells of a fashionable mother who put her first child out to nurse, and who, when her second died at birth and was brought to her bedside in its coffin, was entirely interested—not in the child—but in the pretty lining and covering of the coffin. For it is one of the startling facts of this condition of motherhood that the poor infant left to some dreadful shrew, body and soul, has the very best care taken of its frills and coats and of the wraps in its baby carriage. For these things will be seen by other people’s servants and commented on, and are therefore worthy of attention.

It is a strange state of society which tolerates this awful transfer of duty, and society will have the bill to pay as well as the cruel mother. These neglected children, whatever their birth, come really from the dangerous classes, and have a likelihood to drift there. For the first moral training of a child is the most important of all, and in 108 these cases it is given by women gross both through ignorance and vice; whose relatives are very likely at the same time living in suspicious localities, or in prison wards. And, naturally enough, their first lessons to the children under them are to lie, to deceive, to commit small pilferings, and not be found out. They are ordered not to carry tales out of the nursery, or let mamma know what nurse does not want known. Bad language, bad habits, hatred, petty conciliations, meanness of every kind, are in the curriculum of any nursery left in the care of the women usually found in them.

No one need imagine that the evil thus wrought can be eradicated in future years by a higher class of teachers. The vicious seed is sown; it is next to impossible to go through the field of a child’s mind and gather it up again. It has taken root, and unless it can be crowded out by a nobler growth, the harvest is certain. The mother, then, who prefers pleasure and society to her children, whom she hands over to wicked and cruel nurses, is herself wicked and cruel. She may stand before the world as the personification 109 of refinement and delicacy and elegance, but she is really no better than her substitute; and she has no right to expect that her children will be better. In some favorable cases there may come a redeeming power in future years, but in the main they will drift downward to their first moral impressions; and when they have become bad and unhappy men and women, they will not scruple to say, “From our mother cometh our misery.” These are hard truths, yet one-half has not been told. For if it were not for the abounding number of good mothers, both rich and poor, this class of women would undermine all virtue, and everything lovely and of good report.

There was once an idea that mothers were the antiseptic quality in society, that they preserved its moral tone, by insisting that the language used and the subjects discussed before them should be such as were suitable for virtuous women. But there is one kind of bad mother to whom questionable subjects seem highly suitable. She discusses them without reserve in the presence of her daughters, and she makes her drawing-room 110 the forum for women with queer domestic views, for “Physical Culture” women, and such-like characters. The things our grandmothers went down to their graves without knowing she talks about in unmistakable terms before unmarried girls. A certain mother who boldly defended her opinion that “girls should not be kept ignorant as a means for keeping them innocent,” permitted her own daughter to be present during all the unsavory scandal of Vanity Fair. The child learned to watch with interest the doings of women of many seasons, and to listen with composure to very questionable stories. Before she was twelve years old she had become suspicious of the conduct of every woman, and when her teacher one day asked her, “Who was Moses?” she answered promptly, “The son of Pharoah’s daughter.” “Not the son,” corrected the teacher, “the adopted son. Pharoah’s daughter found him in the river Nile.” “So she said,” replied this premature woman,—suspicions of women’s actions and a ready assumption of the very worst motives for them, being the lessons she had deduced from knowledge 111 imparted before mind and experience were capable of receiving it.

It is often said that “ignorance is not innocence.” True, but neither is knowledge innocence; it is most frequently the first step of guiltiness. What good can come of little children knowing the things which belong to maturity? Is any girl sweeter or even safer for knowing about the under-current of filth below the glittering crust of gilded society? The Chinese quarter is a fact, yet is there a mother who would like her daughter to visit it? But if it is not fit to visit, it is not fit to talk about. No one is ever the better for knowing of evil, unless they can do something to remedy it.

A good mother will shield her children from the consequences of their own ignorance, physical and moral, and she will just as carefully shield them from knowledge which is hurtful because premature,—just as fruit green and unripe is hurtful. And no guardianship is too close for this end. Mothers will generally admit this fact as regards the children of other people, but as to their own brood they cradle themselves 112 in a generous belief of its incorruptibility. Their girls would never do as other girls do; and their girls are consequently permitted a license which they would think dangerous for any but their own daughters. Then some day there is a paragraph in one of the papers, and the men blame the man, and the women blame the girl, and all the time the mother is probably the guiltiest of the parties. She has stimulated her daughter’s imagination in childhood, she has left her to the choice of her companions in youth, she has trusted her sacred duty to circumstances, she has indulged a vague hope concerning the honor and virtue of humanity, and thus satisfied her indolent neglect. But what right had she to expect that men would revere the treasure she herself left unguarded?

For there has been no special race made for this era; what Adam, Jacob, Samson, and David were, what Eve, Sarah, Rachel, Jael, and Bathsheba were, the men and women of to-day are, in all their essentials. Circumstances only have made them to differ; and nature laughs at circumstances, and goes back at any crisis to her first principles. Indeed, 113 the good mother of to-day, instead of relaxing, must increase her care over her children. For never since the world began has youth been so catered to, never has it been surrounded by so many open temptations, never so much flattered, and yet at the same time never have the reins of discipline been so far relaxed. Now the spirit we evoke we must control, or else we must become its slave. If we are no longer to reverence the gray hairs of age; if young men are to drive the chariot of the sun, and young women are to be allowed to strip the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, then it is high time some system of education was invented which will put old heads upon young shoulders. Alas, this can never be, for education is a long and composite process, made up of home influences, surrounding circumstances, and early associations. When books and schools and teachers shall have done all they possibly can, high above every Gamaliel will sit the good mother,—the first influence, the first teacher, the first friend, and the last.

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Unequal Marriages

If there is a mistake peculiarly fatal to a young man’s or a girl’s future, it is that supreme act of social destruction called a mésalliance. Indeed it is not measurable by any of the usual conditions of life, and death itself would be a kindness compared with the long misery of some kinds of mésalliances. They may arise from inequalities of birth, differences in religious faith, or great discrepancies in age; but whatever their occasion, they are always a far-reaching and irretrievable mistake; the mistake par excellence of any life.

An unequal marriage is not only the most fatal blunder of life, it is also the most common one; and although it is not very easy for a man to ruin himself with a single act, a foolish marriage will afford him at least one decided way. In regard to men’s mésalliances, 115 they cannot be said to be specially the temptation of youth. Foolish old men who marry their cooks, and foolish young men who burden themselves with some Casino divinity, keep up a very steady average. But the young man’s mistake is much the worst of the two; for he has his whole life before him, and has probably made no provision against such a social suicide.

If an old man marries beneath his station and culture, he believes he is getting the wife he most desires; and if he is disappointed, he is at any rate near the end of life, and he either has no children to suffer from his folly, or they have already grown beyond its most painful reach. But a young man who binds himself to a woman who is every way beneath his own station, education, and professional ambition, is in a different case. In a very short time the disillusion of those senses begins under which he permitted mere physical beauty to bind him; and he knows that, as far as his future progress is concerned, he has put a millstone about his neck.

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The effect of a social mésalliance on a girl is still worse. In the first place, it ought to be so; for she has to sin against the natural instinct of a good woman, which is always to marry above herself, an instinct which is, both physiologically and socially, noble. For a woman is less than a woman who does not consider the consequence of marriage, and provide in every way possible to her the best father for her offspring. And if she marries beneath herself socially, the almost certain presumption is that the social status of her husband is the measure of his intellectual abilities, and of his personal refinement also. And when a woman considers herself only in her marriage, and has no care for the circumstances to which she may doom her unborn children, she is an incarnation of animal selfishness.

Without stopping to analyze the sources of its disapproval, this is undoubtedly an instinctive motive for the persistent cold shouldering which society gives girls who degrade themselves by a mésalliance. It is obvious to every one that she has sinned against herself, her family, her class, and the 117 highest instincts of her sex. Women have no pardon for such sinners; for they see not only the present wrong, they look forward also to the possible children of such a union. They understand that they will have to suffer all the limitations of poverty when they ought to have had all the advantages of wealth. They may possibly inherit their father’s vulgar tastes and tendencies, or they may have to endure the misery of fine tastes without any opportunity to gratify them. For this premeditated sin against motherhood and against posterity, good women find it hard to tolerate the offender; for they know that a woman’s honor is in her husband, and that her social station and her social life is determined by his.

When a girl is guilty of a mésalliance, it is sometimes said in extenuation that “she has married a man of noble disposition; and it is better to marry a poor, ignorant man, with a noble disposition, than a rich man who is selfish and vicious.” If the alternative was a positive one, yes, but there is no need to make a choice between these characters. Men of refined habits and manners 118 and good education may also have noble dispositions; and poor, ill-bred men have not always noble ones; at any rate, a good woman will always find in her own class just as good men as she will find in a class below her own.

All this danger is evident to parents. They know how fleeting passion and fancy are; and they rightly conceive that it is their duty by all possible means to prevent their daughter making an unworthy marriage. How far parents may lawfully interfere is a question not yet decided, nor yet easy to decide. The American idea of marriage is, theoretically, that every soul finds its companion soul, and lives happily ever after; and in this romantic search for a companion soul, young girls are allowed to roam about society, just when their instincts are the strongest and their reason the weakest. The French theory—to which the English is akin somewhat—is that a mother’s knowledge is better than a girl’s fancy; and that the wisdom that has hitherto chosen her teachers, physicians, spiritual guides, and companions, that has guided her through sickness 119 and health, is not likely to fail in selecting the man most suitable for her husband.

This latter theory supposes women to love naturally any personable man who is their own, and who is kind to them; that is, if she has a virgin heart, and comes in this state from her lessons to her marriage duties. The American theory supposes girls to love by sympathy, and through soul attraction and personal attraction; consequently, our girls are let loose early—too early—to choose among a variety of Wills and Franks and Charlies; and the natural result is a great number of what are called “love matches” to which it must be acknowledged mésalliances are too often the corollary. Between these two theories, it is impossible to make a positive selection; for the bad of each is so bad, and the good of each so good that both alike are capable of the most unqualified praise and blame. It may, however, be safely asserted that the confidence every American girl has in her own power to choose her own husband helps to lessen the danger and to keep things right. For an honorable girl may be trusted with her own honor; and 120 a dishonorable one, amid a number to choose from, may peradventure fare better than she deserves; for Fortune does sometimes bring in the bark that is not steered.

Most girls make mésalliances in sheer thoughtlessness, or through self-will, or in that youthful passion for romance which thinks it fine to lose their world for love. Foolish novels are as often to blame for their social crime as foolish men,—novels which are an apotheosis of love at any cost! Love against every domestic and social obligation! Love in spite of all prudent thought of meat and money matters! Love in a cottage, and nightingales and honeysuckles to pay the rent! And if parents object to their daughter marrying ruin, then they are represented as monsters of cruelty; while the girl who flies stealthily to her misery, and breaks every moral tie to do so, is idealized into an angel of truth and suffering.

In real life what are parents to do with a daughter whose romantic folly has made her marry their groom or their footman? We have outlived the inexorable passions of 121 our ancestors, and their undying loves and hatreds, sacrifices and revenges. Our social code tolerates no passion swallowing up all the rest; and we must be content with a decent expression of feeling. What their daughter has done they cannot undo; nor can they relieve her from the social consequences of her act. She has chosen to put their servant above and before them, and to humiliate her whole family, that she may please her low-born lover and herself, and she has therefore no right to any more consideration than she has given. Her parents may not cease to love her, and they may spare her all reproaches, knowing that her punishment is certain; but they cannot, for the sake of their other children, treat her socially above the station she has chosen. She has become the wife of a servant, and they cannot accept her husband as their equal nor can they insult their friends by introducing him to them. How wretched is the position she has put herself in; for if the man she married be naturally a low man, he will probably drag her to his level by the “grossness of his nature.” If she 122 be a woman of strong character she may lift her husband upward, but she accepts such a labor at the peril of her own higher life. And if she finds it impossible either to lift him to her level or to sink herself to his level, what then remains? Life-long regrets, bitter shame and self-reproach, or else a forcible setting of herself free. But the latter remedy carries desperation instead of hope with it. Never can she quite regain her maiden place, and an aura of a doubtful kind influences every effort of her future life.

After all, though men have not the reputation of being romantic, it is certain that in the matter of unequal marriage, they are more frequently imprudent than women. There is some possibility of lifting a low-born woman to the level of a cultivated man, and men dare this possibility far more frequently than is generally supposed. Perhaps after a long season they find the fine ladies with whom they have flirted and danced a weariness; and in this mood they are suddenly taken with some simple, unfashionable girl, who does not know either 123 how to dress, or flirt, or dance. So they make the grave error of thinking that because fine ladies are insupportable, women who are not fine ladies will be sweet and companionable. But if the one be a blank, will that prove the other a prize? The dulness or folly of a polite woman is bad enough; but the dulness and folly of an uneducated woman is worse. Very soon they find this out, and then comes indifference, neglect, cruelty, and all the misery that attends two ruined lives.

The result of unequal marriage in both sexes is certain wretchedness, and this verdict is not to be altered by its exceptions, however brilliant they may seem to be. For when a man of means and education marries an uneducated girl of low birth, or a woman of apparent culture and high social position marries her servant, and the marriages are reasonably happy, then it may be positively said, “There has been no mésalliance.” The husband and wife were unequal only in their externals. The real characters of both must have been vulgar and naturally low and under-bred.

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It is folly to talk of two beings unequally married “growing together,” or of “time welding their differences,” and making things comfortable. Habit indeed reconciles us to much suffering, and to many trials; but an unequal marriage is a trial no one has any business to have. It is without excuse, and therefore without comfort. When the Almighty decrees us a martyrdom he blends his peace and consolations therewith; but when we torture ourselves our sufferings rage like a conflagration. Perhaps the chain may be worn, as a tight shoe is worn into shape until it no longer lames; but oh, the misery in the process! And even in such case the resigned sufferer has no credit in his patience; quite the contrary, for he knows as well as others know, though submission to what God ordains is the very height of energy and nobility, submission to the mistakes we ourselves make is the very climax of cowardice and weakness.

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Discontented Women

Discontent is a vice six thousand years old, and it will be eternal; because it is in the race. Every human being has a complaining side, but discontent is bound up in the heart of woman; it is her original sin. For if the first woman had been satisfied with her conditions, if she had not aspired to be “as gods,” and hankered after unlawful knowledge, Satan would hardly have thought it worth his while to discuss her rights and wrongs with her. That unhappy controversy has never ceased; and, with or without reason woman has been perpetually subject to discontent with her conditions, and, according to her nature, has been moved by its influence. Some it has made peevish, some plaintive, some ambitious, some reckless, while a noble majority have found in its very control that serene 126 composure and cheerfulness which is granted to those who conquer, rather than to those who inherit.

But, with all its variations of influence and activity, there has never been a time in the world’s history when female discontent has assumed so much and demanded so much as at the present day; and both the satisfied and the dissatisfied woman may well pause to consider whether the fierce fever of unrest which has possessed so large a number of the sex is not rather a delirium than a conviction; whether indeed they are not just as foolishly impatient to get out of their Eden, as was the woman Eve six thousand years ago.

We may premise, in order to clear the way, that there is a noble discontent which has a great work to do in the world; a discontent which is the antidote to conceit and self-satisfaction, and which urges the worker of every kind continually to realize a higher ideal. Springing from Regret and Desire, between these two sighs, all horizons lift; and the very passion of its longing gives to those who feel this divine discontent the 127 power to overleap whatever separates them from their hope and their aspiration.

Having acknowledged so much in favor of discontent, we may now consider some of the most objectionable forms in which it has attacked certain women of our own generation. In the van of these malcontents are the women dissatisfied with their home duties. One of the saddest domestic features of the day is the disrepute into which housekeeping has fallen; for that is a woman’s first natural duty and answers to the needs of her best nature. It is by no means necessary that she should be a Cinderella among the ashes, or a Nausicaa washing linen, or a Penelope forever at her needle, but all women of intelligence now understand that good cooking is a liberal science, and that there is a most intimate connection between food and virtue, and food and health, and food and thought. Indeed, many things are called crimes that are not as bad as the savagery of an Irish cook or the messes of a fourth-rate confectioner.

It must be noted that this revolt of certain women against housekeeping is not a 128 revolt against their husbands; it is simply a revolt against their duties. They consider housework hard and monotonous and inferior, and confess with a cynical frankness that they prefer to engross paper, or dabble in art, or embroider pillow-shams, or sell goods, or in some way make money to pay servants who will cook their husband’s dinner and nurse their babies for them. And they believe that in this way they show themselves to have superior minds, and ask credit for a deed which ought to cover them with shame. For actions speak louder than words, and what does such action say? In the first place, it asserts that any stranger—even a young uneducated peasant girl hired for a few dollars a month—is able to perform the duties of the house-mistress and the mother. In the second place, it substitutes a poor ambition for love, and hand service for heart service. In the third place, it is a visible abasement of the loftiest duties of womanhood to the capacity of the lowest-paid service. A wife and mother cannot thus absolve her own soul; she simply disgraces and traduces her holiest work.

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Suppose even that housekeeping is hard and monotonous, it is not more so than men’s work in the city. The first lesson a business man has to learn is to do pleasantly what he does not like to do. All regular, useful work must be monotonous, but love ought to make it easy; and at any rate the tedium of housework is not any greater than the tedium of office work. As for housekeeping being degrading, that is the veriest nonsense. Home is a little royalty; and if the housewife and mother be of elements finely mixed and loftily educated, all the more she will regard the cold-mutton question of importance, and consider the quality of the soup, and the quantity of chutnee in the curry, as requiring her best attention. It is only the weakest, silliest women who cannot lift their work to the level of their thoughts, and so ennoble both.

There are other types of the discontented wife, with whom we are all too familiar: for instance, the wife who is stunned and miserable because she discovers that marriage is not a lasting picnic; who cannot realize that the husband must be different from the 130 lover, and spends her days in impotent whining. She is always being neglected, and always taking offence; she has an insatiable craving for attentions, and needs continual assurances of affection, wasting her time and feelings in getting up pathetic scenes of accusation, which finally weary, and then alienate her husband. Her own fault! There is nothing a man hates more than a woman going sobbing and complaining about the house with red eyes; unless it be a woman with whom he must live in a perpetual fool’s paradise of perfection.

There are also discontented wives, who goad their husbands into extravagant expenditure, and urge them to projects from which they would naturally recoil. There are others, whose social ambitions slay their domestic ones, and who strain every nerve, in season and out of season, and lose all their self-respect, for a few crumbs of contemptuous patronage from some person of greater wealth than their own. Some wives fret if they have no children, others just as much if children come. In the first case, they are disappointed; in the second, inconvenienced; 131 and in both, discontented. Some lead themselves and others wretched lives because they have not three times as many servants as are necessary; a still greater number because they cannot compass a life of constant amusement and excitement.

A very disagreeable kind of discontented woman is the wife who, instead of having a God to love and worship, makes a god of her religion, alienates love for an ecclesiastical idea, or neglects her own flesh and blood to carry the religious needs of the world; forgetting that the good wife keeps her sentiments very close to her own heart and hearth. But perhaps the majority of discontented wives have no special thing to complain of; they fret because they are “so dull.” If they took the trouble to look for the cause of this “dulness,” they would find it in the want of some definite plan of life, and some vigorous aim or object. Of course any aim implies limitation, but limitation implies both virtue and pleasure. Without rule and law, not even the games of children could exist, and the more strictly the rules of a game are obeyed, the greater the 132 satisfaction. A wife’s duty is subject to the same conditions. If aimless, plaintive women would make strict laws for their households, and lay out some possible vigorous plan for their own lives, they would find that those who love and work have no leisure for complaining.

But from whatever cause domestic discontent springs, it makes the home full of idleness, ennui, and vagrant imaginations, or of fierce extravagance, and passionate love of amusement. And as a wife holds the happiness of many in her hands, discontent with her destiny is peculiarly wicked. If it is resented, she gets what she deserves; if it is quietly endured, her shame is the greater. For nothing does so much honor to a wife as her patience; and nothing does her so little honor as the patience of her husband. And however great his patience may be, she will not escape personal injury; since none are to be held innocent who do harm even to their own soul and body. Besides, it is the inflexible order of things that voluntary faults are followed by inevitable pain.

Married women, however, are by no 133 means the only complainers. There is a great army of discontents who, having no men to care for them, are clamoring, and with justice, for their share of the world’s work and wages. Such women have a perfect right to make a way for themselves, in whatever direction they best can. Brains are of no sex or condition, and at any rate, there is no use arguing either their ability or their right, for necessity has taken the matter beyond the reach of controversy. Thousands of women have now to choose between work, charity, or starvation, for the young man of to-day is not a marrying man. He has but puny passions, and his love is such a very languid preference that he cannot think of making any sacrifice for it. So women do not marry, they work; and as the world will take good work from whoever will give it, the world’s custom is flowing to them by a natural law.

Now, earnest, practical women-workers are blessed, and a blessing; but the discontented among them, by much talking and little doing, continually put back the cause they say they wish to advance. No women are 134 in the main so discontented as women-workers. They go into the arena, and, fettered by old ideas belonging to a different condition, they are not willing to be subject to the laws of the arena. They want, at the same time, the courtesy claimed by weakness and the honor due to prowess. They complain of the higher wages given to men, forgetting that the first article of equal payment is equal worth and work. They know nothing about what Carlyle calls “the silences;” and the babble of their small beginnings is, to the busy world, irritating and contemptible. It never seems to occur to discontented working-women that the best way to get what they want is to act, and not to talk. One silent woman who quietly calculates her chances and achieves success does more for her sex than any amount of pamphleteering and lecturing. For nothing is more certain than that good work, either from man or woman, will find a market; and that bad work will be refused by all but those disposed to give charity and pay for it.

The discontent of working-women is understandable, but it is a wide jump from the 135 woman discontented about her work or wages to the woman discontented about her political position. Of all the shrill complainers that vex the ears of mortals, there are none so foolish as the women who have discovered that the founders of our republic left their work half finished, and that the better half remains for them to do. While more practical and sensible women are trying to put their kitchens, nurseries, and drawing-rooms in order, and to clothe themselves rationally, this class of discontents are dabbling in the gravest national and economic questions. Possessed by a restless discontent with their appointed sphere and its duties, and forcing themselves to the front in order to ventilate their theories and show the quality of their brains, they demand the right of suffrage as the symbol and guarantee of all other rights.

This is their cardinal point, though it naturally follows that the right to elect contains the right to be elected. If this result be gained, even women whose minds are not taken up with the things of the State, but who are simply housewives and mothers, may easily predicate a few of such results as 136 are particularly plain to the feminine intellect and observation. The first of these would be an entirely new set of agitators, who would use means quite foreign to male intelligence. For instance, every favorite priest and preacher would gain enormously in influence and power; for the ecclesiastical zeal which now expends itself in fairs and testimonials would then expend itself in the securing of votes in whatever direction they were instructed to secure them. It might even end in the introduction of the clerical element into our great political Council Chambers,—the bishops in the House of Lords would be a sufficient precedent,—and a great many women would really believe that the charming rhetoric of the pulpit would infuse a higher tone in legislative assemblies.

Again, most women would be in favor of helping any picturesque nationality, without regard to the Monroe doctrine, or the state of the finances, or the needs of the market. Most women would think it a good action to sacrifice their party for a friend. Most women would change their politics, if they saw it to be their interest to do so, without a 137 moment’s hesitation. Most women would refuse the primary obligation on which all franchises rest,—that is, to defend their country by force of arms, if necessary. And if a majority of women passed a law which the majority of men felt themselves justified in resisting by physical force, what would women do? Such a position in sequence of female suffrage is not beyond probability, and yet if it happened, not only one law, but all law would be in danger. No one denies that women have suffered, and do yet suffer, from grave political and social disabilities, but during the last fifty years much has been continually done for their relief, and there is no question but that the future will give all that can be reasonably desired. Time and Justice are friends, though there are many moments that are opposed to Justice. But all such innovations should imitate Time, which does not wrench and tear, but detaches and wears slowly away. Development, growth, completion, is the natural and best advancement. We do not progress by going over precipices, nor re-model and improve our houses by digging under the foundations.

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Finally, women cannot get behind or beyond their nature, and their nature is to substitute sentiment for reason,—a sweet and not unlovely characteristic in womanly ways and places; yet reason, on the whole, is considered a desirable necessity in politics. At the Chicago Fair, and at other convocations, it has been proven that the strongest-minded women, though familiar with platforms, and deep in the “dismal science” of political economy, when it came to disputing, were no more philosophical than the simplest housewife. Tears and hysteria came just as naturally to them as if the whole world wagged by impulse only; yet a public meeting in which feeling and tears superseded reason and argument would in no event inspire either confidence or respect. Women may cease to be women, but they can never learn to be men, and feminine softness and grace can never do the work of the virile virtues of men. Very fortunately this class of discontented women have not yet been able to endanger existing conditions by combinations analogous to trades-unions; nor is it likely they ever will; because it is doubtful if women, 139 under any circumstances, could combine at all. Certain qualities are necessary for combination, and these qualities are represented in women by their opposites.

Considering discontented women of all kinds individually, it is evident that they must be dull women. They see only the dull side of things, and naturally fall into a monotonous way of expressing themselves. They have also the habit of complaining, a habit which quickens only the lower intellect. Where is there a more discontented creature than a good watch-dog? He is forever looking for some infringement of his rights; and an approaching step or a distant bark drives him into a fury of protest. Discontented women are always egotists; they view everything in regard to themselves, and have therefore the defective sympathies that belong to low organizations. They never win confidence, for their discontent breeds distrust and doubt, and however clever they may naturally be, an obtrusive self, with its train of likings and dislikings, obscures their judgment, and they take false views of people and things. For this reason, it is almost a 140 hopeless effort to show them how little people generally care about their grievances; for they have thought about themselves so long and so much that they cannot conceive of any other subject interesting the rest of the world. We may even admit that the women discontented on public subjects are often women of great intelligence, clever women with plenty of brains. Is that the best? Who does not love far more than mere cleverness that sweetness of temper, that sunny, contented disposition, which goes through the world with a smile and a kind word for every one? It is one of the richest gifts of heaven; it is, according to Bishop Wilson, “nine-tenths of Christianity.”

Fortunately, the vast majority of women have been loyal to their sex and their vocation. In every community the makers and keepers of homes are the dominant power; and these strictures can apply only to two classes,—first, the married women who neglect husband, children, and homes, for the foolish éclat of the club and the platform, or for any assumed obligation, social, intellectual or political, which conflicts with their 141 domestic duties: secondly, the unmarried women who, having comfortable homes and loving protectors, are discontented with their happy secluded security and rush into weak art, or feeble literature, or dubious singing and acting, because their vanity and restless immorality lead them into the market place, or on to the stage. Not one of such women has been driven afield by indisputable genius. Any work they have done would have been better done by some unprotected, experienced woman already in the fields they have invaded. And the indifference of this class to the money value of their labor has made it difficult for the women working because they must work or starve, to get a fair price for their work. It is the baldest effrontery for this class of rich discontents to affect sympathy with Woman’s Progress. Nothing can excuse their intrusion into the labor market but unquestioned genius and super-excellence of work; and this has not yet been shown in any single case.

The one unanswerable excuse for woman’s entrance into active public life of any kind is need, and, alas, need is growing daily, as 142 marriage becomes continually rarer, and more women are left adrift in the world without helpers and protectors. But this is a subject too large to enter on here, though in the beginning it sprung from discontented women, preferring the work and duties of men to their own work and duties. Have they found the battle of life any more ennobling in masculine professions than in their old feminine household ways? Is work done in the world for strangers any less tiresome and monotonous than work done in the house for father and mother, husband and children? If they answer truly, they will reply, “The home duties were the easiest, the safest, and the happiest.”

Of course all discontented women will be indignant at any criticism of their conduct. They expect every one to consider their feelings without examining their motives. Paddling in the turbid maelstrom of life, and dabbling in politics and the most unsavory social questions, they still think men, at least, ought to regard them as the Sacred Sex. But women are not sacred by grace of sex, if they voluntarily abdicate its limitations 143 and its modesties, and make a public display of unsexed sensibilities and unabashed familiarity with subjects they have nothing to do with. If men criticise such women with asperity it is not to be wondered at; they have so long idealized women that they find it hard to speak moderately. They excuse them too much, or else they are too indignant at their follies, and unjust and angry in their denunciation. Women must be criticised by women; then they will hear the bare, uncompromising truth, and be the better for it.

In conclusion, it must be conceded that some of the modern discontent of women must be laid to unconscious influence. In every age there is a kind of atmosphere which we call “the spirit of the times,” and which, while it lasts, deceives as to the importance and truth of its dominant opinions. Many women have doubtless thus caught the fever of discontent by mere contact, but such have only to reflect a little, and discover that, on the whole, they have done quite as well in life as they have any right to expect. Then those who are married will 144 find marriage and the care of it, and the love of it, quite able to satisfy all their desires; and such as really need to work will perceive that the great secret of content abides in the unconscious acceptance of life and the fulfilment of its duties,—a happiness serious and universal, but full of comfort and help. Thus they will cease to vary from the kindly race of women, and through the doors of Love, Hope, and Labor, join that happy multitude who have never discovered that life is a thing to be discontented with.

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Women on Horseback

Every woman ought to know how to ride. It is the most healthy of exercises; and in a life of vicissitudes she may some day find it the only method of travel—perchance the only method of saving her life.

The first element of enjoying horse exercise is good riding. Good riding is an affair of skill, a collection of trifles, which, if thoroughly mastered, makes the rider feel thoroughly secure.

A man or a boy may learn to ride by practice; that is, he may tumble off and on until experience not only gives him confidence, but security and even elegance. It is not so with a woman. Her seat is artificial; she must be taught how to keep it; for though she may have a father or brother who has “good hands,” and who can show her 146 how to handle reins and humor her horse’s mouth, he cannot teach her to sit in her saddle because he cannot sit in it himself.

The horse which a lady rides should be up to her weight, well-trained, and docile, for a woman on horseback has little to help her but her hand and her whip. If the flap of the saddle be large, the pressure of the left leg is almost useless, and the folds of her riding dress very often interfere with the discipline of the spur.

The whip is therefore her chief reliance, and its management is of great importance. As it is really to supply the place of a man’s right leg and spur, it should be stiff and real, however light and ornamental. The skin of the hippopotamus makes one both light and severe. There is little difficulty in using it on the right side of the horse, but to use it on the near side is a matter of both skill and caution. Remember, first, never to strike a horse over any part of the head or neck; second, if necessary to strike him on the forehand, quietly lift the whip to an upright position, then let it firmly and suddenly descend along the shoulder and instantly return 147 to the upright position; third, to strike the near hindquarter properly requires a firm and graceful seat. Pass the right hand gently behind the waist, as far as possible, without distorting in the least the position of the body, and strike by holding the whip between the first two fingers and thumb. This action ought to be performed without disturbing either the position or action of the bridle hand.

As the riding dress of a gentleman should never be groomish, so that of a lady should never be fast or flashy. The hat should sit tightly to the head, for the hands are needed for reins and whip, and cannot safely be continually occupied in its adjustment. The plainer it is, the more ladylike; but if plumes are used, then those of the cock, pheasant, peacock, or heron, are most suitable. The habit, if for real use, may be lined a foot deep with leather. In English hunting counties light vests are sometimes worn in bright weather, and in winter, over-jackets of sealskin. It is well to remember that it is the chest and back which need double protection, both during and after 148 hard riding. Skirts are seriously in the way. The snug flannel under-dress and the pantalets of the same cloth as the habit are all that is necessary. Light, high boots are a great comfort in riding long distances, and almost equally good are gaiters of heavy cloth, velvet, or corduroy.

The saddle ought always to have what is called the hunting-horn on the left side; yet however common it is in the North, I never saw it on a saddle in Texas during ten years. The right-hand pommel is in the way, and the best saddles have now only a flat projection in its place. It prevents the rider from putting the right hand as low as a restive horse requires it, and young and timid riders are apt to get a habit of leaning on it.

The value of the hunting pommel is very great. If the horse leaps suddenly up, it holds down the left knee, and makes it a fulcrum to keep the right one in its proper place. In riding down steep places it prevents sliding forward, and assists greatly in managing a hard puller. A rider cannot be thrown on it, and it renders it next to impossible 149 that she should be thrown on the other pommel; besides, it gives the habit and figure a much finer appearance.

But it is necessary for every lady to have this pommel as carefully fitted to her person as her habit is. Not only see the saddle in progress, but sit on it. A chance saddle may seem to suit; so also, if a No. 4 shoe is worn, a ready-made 4 may be wearable; but as a shoe made to fit the wearer’s foot is always best, so also is a saddle that is adjusted to the rider’s proportions.

A stirrup may be an advantage, if the foot is likely to weary; but since the general introduction of the third pommel it is not necessary to a woman in the way that it is to a man. A woman, also, is very apt to make it a lever for “wriggling” about in her saddle,—a habit that is not only very ungraceful, but which gives many a horse a sore back, which a firm, quiet seat never does.

Reins should not be given to a learner; her first lessons should be on a led horse. The best horsewomen in England have been taught how to walk, canter, gallop, trot, and leap without the assistance of reins. I do 150 not advocate the plan for general use, but I do know that learners are apt to acquire the habit of holding on by the bridle.

When the hand is trusted with reins, hold them in both hands. One bridle and two hands are far better than two bridles and one hand. The practice of one-handed riding originated in military schools; for a trooper has a sword or lance to carry, and riding-schools have usually been kept by old soldiers. But who attempts to turn a horse in harness with one hand? Don’t hold the reins as if you were afraid of letting them go again, for this not only gives a “dead” hand, but compels the rider’s body to follow the vagaries of the horse’s head. Lightly and smoothly, “as if they were a worsted thread,” hold the reins; and from the time the horse is in motion till the ride is finished, never cease a gentle sympathetic feeling upon the mouth. Women generally attain a “good hand” easier than men. In the first place, it is partly natural and spontaneous; in the second, they do not rely so much upon their physical strength and courage. A man in the pride of his youth is apt to despise this manipulation.

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Many riders say it is better for a woman to use only the curb; but if she does this, all chance of learning “hand” is gone. I say, let her use the reins in both hands, slackening or tightening according to the pace she wishes, and the horse’s eagerness. If she succeeds in this, and never keeps “a dead pull,” she is a long way toward being a good horsewoman. As to turning, there is no better rule than Colonel Greenwood’s simple maxim: “When you wish to turn to the right, pull the right-hand rein stronger than the left”—and vice versa.

All women should learn to canter before learning to trot. It is a much easier pace, and helps to give confidence. To canter with the right foreleg leading, make an extra bearing on the right rein, and a strong pressure with the left leg, heel, or spur; at the same time bring the whip across the near forehand of the horse. If he hesitates, pass the hand behind the waist and strike the near hindquarter.

To canter with the left foreleg leading, the extra bearing must be made on the left rein, by turning up the little finger toward 152 the right shoulder, and using the whip on the right shoulder or flank. Never permit the horse to choose which foreleg shall lead; make him subject to your will and hand; and it is a good plan to change the leading leg when in a canter. In all movements remember to keep the bridle arm close to the body, and do not throw the elbow outward. The movements of the hand must come from the wrist alone, and the bearings on the horse’s mouth be made by gently turning upward the little finger, at the same time keeping the hand firmly closed upon the reins.

The horse is urged to trot by bearing equally on both reins, and using the whip gently on the right flank. Sit well down in the saddle, and rise and fall with the action of the horse, springing lightly from the in-step and the knee. Nothing is uglier than rising too high, and besides its awkward, ungraceful appearance, it endangers the position. If the horse strikes into a canter of his own accord, bring him at once to a halt and begin again, or bear strongly on both reins till he resumes his trot, or else break the canter by bearing strongly on the rein opposite to his 153 leading leg. Always begin at a gentle pace, and never trot a moment after either fear or fatigue is felt.

The horsemanship of a lady is never complete until she has learned to leap; for even if she intend nothing beyond a canter in the park, horses will leap at times without permission. When a horse rises to a leap, lean well forward, and bear gently on the mouth. When he makes the spring, strike the right flank (if necessary). As he descends, lean backward, pressing the leg firmly against the hunting pommel, and bearing the bridle strongly on the mouth. Collect the horse with the whip, and urge him forward at speed.

I shall now say a few words about mounting and dismounting, though every tyro imagines these to be the easiest of actions. In mounting, stand close to the horse, with the right hand on the middle pommel, the whip in the left hand, and the left hand on the groom’s right shoulder. Do not scramble, but spring, into the saddle; sit well down, and let the right leg hang over the pommel a little back, for if the foot pokes 154 out, the hold is not firm. Lean rather back than forward, firm and close from the hips downward, flexible from the hips upward. The reins must be held apart a little above the level of the knee. In dismounting, first take the right leg from its pommel, then the left from the stirrup. See that the dress is clear from all the pommels, especially the hunting one; let the reins fall on the horse’s neck, place the left hand on the right arm of the groom, and the right hand on the hunting-pommel, and descend to the ground on the balls of the feet.

I have one more subject to notice. It is this: If a woman is to go out riding, no matter who may be her chaperon, nor whether it be in the park or the hunting field, she ought to know how to take care of herself; not with obtrusive independence, but with that modest, unassuming confidence which is the result of a perfect acquaintance with all that the situation demands.

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A Good Word For Xanthippe

BY WAY OF APOLOGY, EXPLANATION, AND DEFENCE

We may be pardoned, perhaps, for judging the living according to our humor, but the dead, at least, we should judge only with our reason. Become eternal, we should endeavor to measure them with the eternal rule of justice. If we did this, how many characters having now an immortality of ill, would secure a more favorable verdict. For twenty-three centuries Xanthippe has been regarded as the type of everything unlovely in womanhood and wifehood. We forget all the other Grecian matrons of Periclean times, to remember this poor wife with scorn. Yet if we would bestow half the careful scrutiny on an accurate analysis of her position which is given to other 156 texts of classical writers, we might find her worthy of our sympathy more than scorn.

In the “Memorabilia” of Xenophon (II.2) Socrates is represented as pointing out to his eldest son, Lamprocles, the duty of paying a respectful attention to a mother who loved him so much better than any one else, and he calls him a “wretch” who should neglect it. Indeed, the picture he draws of the maternal relation is one of the finest things in ancient literature. Would Socrates have urged respect and obedience towards a mother unworthy of it? Would Lamprocles have received the fatherly flogging and reproof as meekly as he did if he had not been sensible of his error? And if there had been anything incongruous in Socrates demanding for Xanthippe Lamprocles’ respect and obedience, would not Xenophon have noticed it? But it is not to philosophers and fathers we appeal for Xanthippe; mothers and housewives must judge her. When she married Socrates he was a sculptor, and, according to report, a very fair one,—not, perhaps, a Phidias, but one doing good, serviceable, paying work. He had a house in Athens, 157 and people paid rent and went to market then as now; and he had a wife and family whom it is evident he ought to support. Doubtless Xanthippe was a good housekeeper,—women with sharp tempers usually have that compensation,—but who can keep house amiably upon nothing? Mr. Grote tells us that Socrates relinquished his paying profession and devoted himself to teaching, “excluding all other business to the neglect of all means of fortune.”

If he had taken money for teaching, perhaps Xanthippe might not have opposed him so much; but he would neither ask nor receive reward. The fact probably was, Socrates had a delight in talking, and he preferred talking to business. Whatever we may think of his “talks,” Xanthippe did not likely consider them anything wonderful. Nothing but a jury of women whose husbands have “missions,” and neglect everything for them, could fairly judge Xanthippe on this point. It is of no use for us to say, “Socrates was such a great man, such a divine teacher;” Xanthippe did not know it, and a great many of the wisest and greatest 158 of the Athenians had no more sense in this respect than she had. Aristophanes regularly turned him into sport for the theatres. What Christian wife would like that? Comic plays were written about him, and the gamins under the porticos ridiculed him. If he had been honored, Xanthippe would have forgiven his self-imposed poverty; but to be poor, and laughed at! Doubtless he deserved a good portion of the curtain lectures he got.

Then Xanthippe had another cause of complaint in which she will be sure of the sympathy of all wives. Socrates did not share in its full bitterness the poverty to which he condemned his family. While she was eating her pulse and olives at home, he was dining with Athenian nobles, and drinking wine by the side of the brilliant Aspasia or the fascinating Theodite.

We see Socrates, “splendid through the shades of time,” as a great moral teacher; but many of the Athenians of his day laughed at him, and very few admired him. At any rate he did not provide for the wants of his household, and even a bachelor like Saint Paul severely condemns such a one. 159 Certainly the men of Athens did not admire Socrates, and probably the women of Xanthippe’s acquaintance sympathized with her,—to a woman of her temperament a very great aggravation. It may be said all this is special pleading, but when we have knocked at the door of certain truths in vain, we should try and get into them by the window.

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The Favorites of Men

It may be taken as a rule that women who are favorites with men are very seldom favorites with their own sex. Wherever women congregate, and other women are under discussion, men’s favorites are named with that tone of disapproval and disdain which infers something not quite proper—something undesirable in the position. If specific charges are made, the “favorite” will probably be called “an artful little flirt,” or she will be “sly” or “fast.” Matrons will wonder what the men see in her face or figure; and the young girls will deplore her manners, or rather her want of manners; or they will mercifully “hope there is nothing really wrong in her freedom and boldness, but——” and the sigh and shrug will deny the charitable hope with all the emphasis necessary for her condemnation. For if a 161 girl is a favorite with the men of her own set, she is naturally disliked by the women, since she attracts to herself far more than her share of admiration; and the admiration of men, whether women acknowledge it or not, is the desire and delight of the feminine heart, just as the love of women is the desire and delight of the masculine heart.

In their social intercourse two kinds of women please men: the bright, pert woman, who says such things and does such things as no other woman would dare to say and do, and who is therefore very amusing; and the sympathetic woman who admires and perhaps loves them. But these two great classes have wide and indefinite varieties, and the bright little woman with her innocent audaciousness, and the graceful, swan-necked angel, with her fine feelings and her softly spoken compliments, are but types of species that have infinite peculiarities, and distinctions. The two women, sitting quietly in the same room and dressed in the same orthodox fashion, may not appear to be radically different, but as soon as conversation and dancing commence, the one, 162 in a frankly outspoken way, says just what she thinks, and charms in the most undisguised manner, while the other must be looked for in retired corners, quiet and demure, listening with pensive adoration to her companion’s cleverness, and flirting in that insidious way which sets other women’s cheeks burning with indignation.

An absolutely womanly ideal for the purposes of flirtation or of platonic friendship—if such an emotion exists—is not supposable; for man is himself so many-sided that the woman who is perfect in one’s estimation would be uninteresting in another’s. It is, however, very certain that the women men flirt with are not the women men marry. Their social favorites, are not the matrimonial favorites, and therefore it is not a good thing for a girl’s settlement that she should get the reputation of being a “gentlemen’s favorite.” It is rather a position to be avoided, for the brightest or sweetest girl with this character will likely pass her best years in charming all without being able to fix one lover to her side for life. This is the secret of the great number of plain 163 married women whom every one counts among his acquaintances.

The position of a favorite is no easy one. She has to cultivate many qualities which should be put to better use and bring her more satisfactory results. She must have discrimination enough to value flirting at its proper value; for if she confounds love-making with love, and takes everything au grand serieux, her reputation as a safe favorite would be seriously endangered. In her flirtations she must never permit herself to show whether she be hit or not. She must never suffer a fop to have any occasion for a boast. She must avoid every circumstance which would allow a feminine rival an opportunity for a sneer. She must be able to give and take cheerfully, to conceal every social wound and slight, and to be deaf to every disagreeable thing. In short, she must be armed at every point, and never lay down her arms, and never be off watch. It is therefore a position whose requirements, if translated into active business life, would employ the utmost resources of a fertile and energetic man.

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And what are the general results of talents so varied and so industriously employed? As a usual thing, the gentlemen’s favorite dances and flirts her way from a brilliant girlhood to a fretful, neglected femme passée. She has in the meantime had the mortification of seeing the plain girls whom she despised become honored wives and mothers, and possibly leaders in that set of the social world of which she still makes one of the rank and file of spinsterhood. Her disappointments, in spite of her careful concealment of them, tell upon her physique. She sees the waning of her power, and the approaches of that winter of discontent which wasted opportunities are sure to bring.

Spurred with a sense of haste by some unhappy slight, she perhaps unadvisedly marries a man who ten years previously would not have ventured to clasp her shoe-buckle. If he happens to possess a firm will and a strong character, he will try to pull her sharply up to his mark, and there will be endless frictions and reprisals, with all their possible results. If he is some old lover, weak in purpose, fatuous and brainless in his 165 admiration, then the foolish flirting virgin will likely become a foolish flirting wife; and a miserable complaisance will bring forth its natural outgrowth of contempt and dislike, and perhaps culminate in some flagrant social misdemeanor.

To be a favorite with men is not, then, a desirable honor for any woman. They will admire her loveliness, sun themselves in her smiles, and catch a little ephemeral pleasure and glory in her favor; but they will not marry her. And the reason, though not very evident to a thoughtless girl, is at least a very real and powerful one. It is because such a girl never touches them on their best side, and never reveals in herself that womanly nature which a man knows instinctively is the foundation of wifely value,—that nature which expresses itself in service for love’s sake, as a very necessity of its being.

On the contrary, a “favorite” leans all to one side, and that side is herself. She is overbearing and exacting in the most trivial matters of outward homage. She will be served on the bended knee, and her service is a hard and ungrateful one. And this is 166 the truth about such homage: men may be compelled to kneel to a woman’s whims for a short time, but when they do find courage to rise to their feet they go away forever.

So that, after all, the estimate of women for those of their own sex who are favorites of a great number of men is a very just one. It is neither unfair nor untrue in its essentials, for in this world we can only judge actions by their consequences; and the consequences of a long career of general admiration do not justify honorable mention of the belle of many seasons. She can hardly escape the results of her social experience. She must of necessity become false and artificial. She cannot avoid a morbid jealousy of her own rights, and a painful jealousy of the successes of those who have passed her in the matrimonial career.