Transcriber’s Note

Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or stretching them.

THE MECCAS OF THE WORLD

ANNE WARWICK

BOOKS BY ANNE WARWICK

COMPENSATION
$1.30 net

THE UNKNOWN WOMAN
$1.30 net

JOHN LANE COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Underwood & Underwood

AN AMERICAN ALLEGORY: FIVE HUNDRED FEET ABOVE HIS SKYSCRAPER, AND STILL CLIMBING!

THE MECCAS OF
THE WORLD

THE PLAY OF MODERN LIFE IN
NEW YORK, PARIS, VIENNA,
MADRID AND LONDON

BY
ANNE WARWICK

AUTHOR OF “THE UNKNOWN WOMAN,” “COMPENSATION,” ETC.

NEW YORK
JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMXIII

Copyright, 1913, by
JOHN LANE COMPANY

TO
MY FATHER

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PROLOGUE

A play is a play in so much as it furnishes a fragment of actual life. Being only a fragment, and thus literally torn out of the mass of life, it is bound to be sketchy; to a certain extent even superficial. Particularly is this the case where the scene shifts between five places radically different in elements and ideals. The author can only present the (to her) most impressive aspects of the several pictures, trusting to her sincerity to bridge the gaps her enforced brevity must create. And first she invites you to look at the piece in rehearsal.

I
IN REHEARSAL
(New York)

I
THE CAST

Thanks to the promoters of opéra bouffe we are accustomed as a universe to screw our eye to a single peep-hole in the curtain that conceals a nation, and innocently to accept what we see therefrom as typical of the entire people. Thus England is generally supposed to be inhabited by a blond youth with a top-hat on the back of his head, and a large boutonnière overwhelming his morning-coat. He carries a loud stick, and says “Ah,” and is invariably strolling along Piccadilly. In France, the youth has grown into a bad, bold man of thirty—a boulevardier, of course—whose features consist of a pair of inky moustaches and a wicked leer. He sits at a table and drinks absinthe, and watches the world go by. The world is never by chance engaged elsewhere; it obligingly continues to go by.

Spain has a rose over her ear, and listens with patience to a perpetual guitar; Austria forever is waltzing upstairs, while America is known to be populated by a sandy-haired person of no definite age or embellishments, who spends his time in the alternate amusements of tripling his fortune and ejaculating “I guess!” He has a white marble mansion on Fifth Avenue, and an office in Wall Street, where daily he corners cotton or sugar or crude oil—as the fancy strikes him. And he is bounded on every side by sky-scrapers.

Like most widely accepted notions, this is picturesque but untrue. The Americans of America, or at least the New Yorkers of New York, are not the handful of men cutting off coupons in mahogany offices “down-town”; nor the silken, sacheted women gliding in and out of limousines, with gold purses. They are the swarm of shop-keepers and “specialists,” mechanics and small retailers, newspaper reporters and petty clerks, such as flood the Subways and Elevated railways of New York morning and night; fighting like savages for a seat. They are the army of tailors’ and shirt-makers’ and milliners’ girls who daily pour through the cross-streets, to and from their sordid work; they are the palely determined hordes who batter at the artistic door of the city, and live on nothing a week. They are the vast troops of creatures born under a dozen different flags, whom the city has seduced with her golden wand, whom she has prostituted to her own greed, whom she will shortly fling away as worthless scrap—and who love her with a passion that is the root and fibre of their souls.

So much for the actual New Yorkers, as contrasted with the gilded nonentity of musical comedy and best-selling fiction. As for New York itself, it has the appearance of behind the scenes at a gigantic theatre. Coming into the harbour is like entering the house of a great lady by the back door. Jagged rows of match-like buildings present their blank rear walls to the river, or form lurid bills of advertisement for somebody’s pork and beans; huge barns of ferry terminuses overlap with their galleries the narrow streets beneath; slim towers shoot up, giddy and dazzling-white, in the midst of grimy tenements and a hideous black network of elevated railways; the domes of churches and of pickle factories, the turrets of prisons and of terra cotta hotels, the electric signs of theatres and of cemetery companies, are mingled indiscriminately in a vast, hurled-together heap. While everywhere great piles of stone and steel are dizzily jutting skyward, ragged and unfinished.

It is plain to be seen that here life is in preparation—a piece in rehearsal; with the scene-shifters a bit scarce, or untutored in their business. One has the uncomfortable sensation of having been in too great haste to call; and so caught the haughty city on her moving-in day. This breeds humility in the visitor, and indulgence for the poor lady who is doing her best to set her house to rights. It is a splendid house, and a distinctly clever lady; and certainly in time they will adjust themselves to one another and to the world outside. For the present they loftily enjoy a gorgeous chaos.

Into this the stranger is landed summarily, and with no pause of railway journey before he attacks the city. London, Paris, Madrid, may discreetly withdraw a hundred miles or more further from the impatient foreigner: New York confronts him brusquely on the pier. And from his peaceful cabin he is plunged into a vortex of hysterical reunions, rushing porters, lordly customs officials, newspaper men, express-agents, bootblacks and boys shouting “Tel-egram!” He has been on the dock only five minutes, when he realizes that the dock itself is unequivocally, uncompromisingly New York.

Being New York, it has at once all the conveniences and all the annoyances known to man, there at his elbow. One can talk by long distance telephone from the pier to any part of the United States; or one can telegraph a “day letter” or a “night letter” and be sure of its delivery in any section of the three-thousand mile continent by eight o’clock next morning. One can check one’s trunks, when they have passed the customs, direct to one’s residence—whether it be Fifth Avenue, New York, or Nob Hill, San Francisco; time, distance, the clumsiness of inanimate things, are dissipated before the eyes of the dazzled stranger.

On the other hand, before even he has set foot on American soil, he becomes acquainted with American arrogance, American indifference, the fantasy of American democracy. The national attitude of I-am-as-good-as-you-are has been conveyed to him through the surly answers of the porter, the cheerful familiarity of the customs examiner, the grinning impudence of the express-man. These excellent public servants would have the foreigner know once and for all that he is in a land where all men are indisputably proven free and equal, every minute. The extremely interesting fact that all men are most unequal—slaves to their own potentialities—has still to occur to the American. He is in the stage of doing, not yet of thinking; therefore he finds disgrace in saying “sir” to another man, but none in showing him rudeness.

In a civilization like that of America, where the office-boy of today is the millionaire of tomorrow, and the millionaire of today tomorrow will be begging a job, there cannot exist the hard and fast lines which in older worlds definitely fix one man as a gentleman, another as his servant. Under this management of lightning changes, the most insignificant of the chorus nurses (and with reason) the belief that he may be jumped overnight into the leading rôle. There is something rather fine in the desperate self-confidence of every American in the ultimate rise of his particular star. Out of it, I believe, grows much of that feverish activity which the visitor to New York invariably records among his first impressions. One has barely arrived, and been whirled from the dock into the roar and rush of Twenty-third Street and Broadway, when he begins to realize the relentless energy of the place.

The very wind sweeps along the tunnel-like streets, through the rows of monster buildings, with a speed that takes the breath. In the fiercest of the gale, at the intersection of the two great thoroughfares of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, rises the solid, serene bulk of the Flatiron Building—like a majestic Wingèd Victory breasting the storm. Over to the right, in Madison Square, Metropolitan Tower rears its disdainful white loftiness; far above the dusky gold and browns of old Madison Square Garden; above the dwarfed Manhattan Club, the round Byzantine dome of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church. But the Flatiron itself has the proudest site in New York; facing, to the north, on one side the tangle and turmoil of Broadway—its unceasing whirr of business, business, business; on the other side, the broad elegance and dignity of Fifth Avenue, with its impressive cavalcade of mounted police. While East and West, before this giant building, rush the trams and traffic of Twenty-third Street; and to the South lie the arches of aristocratic old Washington Square.

It is as though at this converging point one gathers together all the outstanding threads in the fabric of the city, to visualize its central pattern. And the outstanding types of the city here are gathered also. One sees the ubiquitous “businessman,” in his careful square-shouldered clothes, hurrying from bus to tram, or tearing down-town in a taxi; the almost ubiquitous business-woman, trig and quietly self-confident, on her brisk up-town walk to the office; and the out-of-town woman “shopper,” with her enormous hand-bag, and the anxious-eyed Hebrew “importer” (whose sign reads Maison Marcel), and his stunted little errand-girl darting through the maze of traffic like a fish through well-known waters; the idle young man-about-town, immortalized in the sock and collar advertisements of every surface car and Subway; and the equally idle young girl, in her elaborate sameness the prototype of the same cover of the best magazines: even in one day, there comes to be a strange familiarity about all these people.

They are peculiar to their own special class, but within that class they are as like as peas in a pod. They have the same features, wear the same clothes even to a certain shade, and do the same things in identically the same day. With all about them shifting, progressing, alternating from hour to hour, New Yorkers, in themselves, remain unaltered. Or, if they change, they change together as one creature—be he millionaire or Hebrew shop-keeper, doctor of divinity or manager of comic opera. For, of all men under the sun, the New Yorker is a type; acutely suspicious of and instinctively opposed to anything independent of the type. Hence, in spite of the vast numbers of different peoples brought together on Manhattan Island, we find not a community of Americans growing cosmopolitan, but a community of cosmopolitans forced to grow New Yorkers. This, under the potent influence of extreme American adaptability, they do in a remarkably short time; the human potpourri who five years ago had never seen Manhattan, today being indistinguishable in the representative city mass.

Walk out Fifth Avenue at the hour of afternoon parade, or along Broadway on a matinée day: the habitués of the two promenades differ only in degree. Broadway is blatant. Fifth Avenue is desperately toned-down. On Broadway, voices and millinery are a few shades more strident, self-assertion a few shades more arrogant than on the less ingenuous Avenue. Otherwise, what do you find? The same over-animated women, the same over-languid young girls; wearing the same velvets and furs and huge corsage bouquets, and—unhappily—the same pearl powder and rouge, whether they be sixteen or sixty, married or demoiselle. Ten years ago New York could boast the loveliest, naturally beautiful galaxy of young girls in the world; today, since the onslaught of French fashion and artificiality, this is no longer true. On the other hand, it is pitiable to see the hard painted lines and fixed smile of the women of the world in the faces of these girls of seventeen and eighteen who walk up and down the Avenue day after day to stare and be stared at with almost the boldness of a boulevard trotteuse.

Underwood & Underwood

THE AFTERNOON PARADE ON FIFTH AVENUE

Foreigners who watch them from club windows write enthusiastic eulogies in their praise. To me they seem a terrible travesty on all that youth is meant to be. They take their models from pictures of French demi-mondaines shown in ultra-daring race costumes, in the Sunday newspapers; and whom they fondly believe to be great ladies of society. I had almost said that from head to foot they are victims of an entirely false conception of beauty and grace; but when it comes to their feet, they are genuine American, and, so, frank and attractive. Indeed there is no woman as daintily and appropriately shod as the American woman, whose trim short skirts betray this pleasant fact with every step she takes.

Nowhere, however, is appearance and its detail more misrepresentative than in New York. Strangers exclaim at the opulence of the frocks and furs displayed by even the average woman. They have no idea that the average woman lives in a two-by-four hall bedroom—or at best a three-room flat; and that she has saved and scrimped, or more probably gone into debt to acquire that one indispensable good costume. Nor could they imagine that her chief joy in a round of sordid days is parade in it as one of the luxurious throng that crowd Fifth Avenue and its adjacent tea-rooms from four till six every afternoon.

Not only the women of Manhattan itself revel in this daily scene; but their neighbors from Brooklyn, Staten Island, Jersey City and Newark pour in by the hundreds, from the underground tubes and the ferries that connect these places with New York. The whole raison d’être of countless women and girls who live within an hour’s distance of the city is this everyday excursion to their Mecca: the leisurely stroll up Fifth Avenue from Twenty-third Street, down from Fifty-ninth; the cup of tea at one of the rococo hotels along the way. It is a routine of which they never seem to tire—a monotony always new to them. And the pathetic part of it is that while they all—the indigent “roomers,” the anxious suburbanites, and the floating fraction of tourists from the West and South—fondly imagine they are beholding the Four Hundred of New York society, they are simply staring at each other!

And accepting each other naïvely at their clothes value. The woman of the hall bedroom receives the same appreciative glance as the woman with a bank account of five figures; provided that outwardly she has achieved the same result. The prime mania of New York is results—or what appear to be results. Every sky-scraper in itself is an exclamation-point of accomplishment. And the matter is not how one accomplishes, but how much; so that the more sluggish European can feel the minutes being snatched and squeezed by these determined people round him and made to yield their very utmost before being allowed to pass into telling hours and days.

With this goes an air of almost offensive competency—an air that is part of the garments of the true New Yorker; as though he and he alone can compass the affair towards which he is forever hurrying. There is about him, always, the piquant insinuation that he is keeping someone waiting; that he can. I have been guilty of suspecting that this attitude, together with his painstakingly correct clothes, constitute the chief elements in the New Yorker’s game of “bluff.” Let him wear what the ready-made tailor describes as “snappy” clothes, and he is at once respected as successful. A man may be living on one meal a day, but if he can contrive a prosperous appearance, together with the preoccupied air of having more business than he can attend to, he is in the way of being begged to accept a position, at any moment.

No one is so ready to be “bluffed” as the American who spends his life “bluffing.” In him are united the extremes of ingenuousness and shrewdness; so that often through pretending to be something he is not, he does actually come to be it. A Frenchman or a German or an Englishman is born a barber; he remains a barber and dies a barber, like his father and grandfather before him. His one idea is to be the best barber he can be; to excell every other barber in his street. The American scorns such lack of “push.” If his father is a barber, he himself learns barbering only just well enough to make a living while he looks for a “bigger job.” His mind is not on pleasing his clients, but on himself—five, ten, twenty years hence.

He sees himself a confidential clerk, then manager’s assistant, then manager of an independent business—soap, perhaps; he sees himself taken into partnership, his wife giving dinners, his children sent to college. And so vivid are these possibilities to him, reading and hearing of like histories every day in the newspapers and on the street, that unconsciously he begins to affect the manners and habits of the class he intends to make his own. In an astonishingly short time they are his own; which means that he has taken the main step towards the realization of his dream. It is the outward and visible signs of belonging which eventually bring about that one does belong; and no one is quicker to grasp this than the obscure American. He has the instincts of the born climber. He never stops imitating until he dies; and by that time his son is probably governor of the State, and his daughter married to a title. What a people! As a Frenchman has put it, “il n’y a que des phenomènes!”

One cannot conclude an introductory sketch of some of their phenomena without a glance at their amazing architecture. The first complacent question of the newspaper interviewer to every foreigner is: “What do you think of our sky-scrapers?” And one is certainly compelled to do a prodigious deal of thinking about them, whether he will or no. For they are being torn down and hammered up higher, all over New York, till conversation to be carried on in the street must needs become a dialogue in monosyllabic shouts; while walking, in conjunction with the upheavals of new Subway tunnelling, has all the excitements of traversing an earthquake district.

Underwood & Underwood

A PATCH OF THE CRAZY-QUILT BROADWAY, FROM 42d STREET

This perpetual transition finds its motive in the enormous business concentrated on the small island of Manhattan, and the constant increase in office space demanded thereby. The commerce of the city persistently moves north, and the residents flee before it; leaving their fine old Knickerbocker homes to be converted into great department stores, publishing houses, but above all into the omnivorous office-building. The mass of these are hideous—dizzy, squeezed-together abortions of brick and steel—but here and there among the horrors are to be found examples of true if fantastic beauty. The Flatiron Building is one, the Woolworth Building (especially in its marvellous illumination by night) another, the new colonnaded offices of the Grand Central Station a third. Yet the general impression of New York architecture upon the average foreigner is of illimitable confusion and ugliness.

It is because the American in art is a Futurist. He so far scorns the ideal as to have done with imagination altogether; substituting for it an invention so titanic in audacity that to the untrained it appears grotesque. In place of the ideal he has set up the one thing greater: truth. And as truth to every man is different (only standard being relatively fixed) how can he hope for concurrence in his masterpiece? The sky-scraper is more than a masterpiece: it is a fact. A fact of violence, of grim struggle, and of victory; over the earth that is too small, and the winds that rage in impotence, and the heavens that heretofore have been useless. It is the accomplished fact of man’s dauntless determination to wrest from the elements that which he sees he needs; and as such it has a beauty too terrible to be described.

II
CONVENIENCE VS. CULTURE

Here are the two prime motives waging war in the American drama of today. Time is money; whether for the American it is to mean anything more is still a question. Meanwhile every time-saving convenience that can be invented is put at his disposal, be he labouring man or governor of a state. And, as we have seen in the case of the sky-scraper, little or no heed is paid to the form of finish of the invention; its beauty is its practicability for immediate and exhaustive use.

Take that most useful of all, for example: the hotel. An Englishman goes to a hotel when he is obliged to, and then chooses the quietest he can find. Generally it has the appearance of a private house, all but the discreet brass plate on the door. He rings for a servant to admit him; his meals are served in his rooms, and weeks go by without his seeing another guest in the house. The idea is to make the hotel in as far as possible duplicate the home.

In America it is the other way round; the New Yorker in particular models his home after his hotel, and seizes every opportunity to close his own house and live for weeks at a time in one of the huge caravanseries that gobble up great areas of the city. “It is so convenient,” he tells you, lounging in the gaudy lobby of one of these hideous terra-cotta structures. “No servant problem, no housekeeping worries for madame, and everything we want within reach of the telephone bell!”

Quite true, when the pompadoured princess below-stairs condescends to answer it. Otherwise you may sit in impotent rage, ten stories up, while she finishes a twenty-minute conversation with her “friend” or arranges to go to a “show” with the head barber; for in all this palace of marble staircases and frescoed ceilings, Louis Quinze suites and Russian baths there is not an ordinary bell in the room to call a servant. Everything must be ordered by telephone; and what boots it that there is a telegraph office, a stock exchange bureau, a ladies’ outfitting shop, a railroad agency, a notary, a pharmacist and an osteopath in the building—if to control these conveniences one must wander through miles of corridors and be shot up and down a dozen lifts, because the telephone girl refuses to answer?

From personal experience, I should say that the servant problem is quite as tormenting in hotels as in most other American establishments. The condescension of these worthies, when they deign to supply you with some simple want, is amazing. Not only in hotels, but in well-run private houses, they seize every chance for conversation, and always turn to the subject of their own affairs—their former prosperity, the mere temporary necessity of their being in service, and their glowing prospects for the future. They insist on giving you their confidential opinion of the establishment in which you are a guest, and which is invariably far inferior to others in which they have been employed. They comment amiably on your garments, if they are pleased with them, or are quite as ready to convey that they are not. And woe to him who shows resentment! He may beseech their service henceforth in vain. If, however, he meekly accepts them as they are, they will graciously be pleased to perform for him the duties for which they are paid fabulous wages.

Hotel servants constitute the aristocracy among “domestics,” as they prefer to call themselves; just as hotel dwellers—of the more luxurious type—constitute a kind of aristocracy among third-rate society in New York. These people lead a strange, unreal sort of existence, living as it were in a thickly gilded, thickly padded vacuum, whence they issue periodically into the hands of a retinue of hangers-on: manicures, masseurs, hair-dressers, and for the men a train of speculators and sporting parasites. In this world, where there are no definite duties or responsibilities, there are naturally no fixed hours for anything. Meals occur when the caprice of the individual demands them—breakfast at one, or at three, if he likes; dinner at the supper hour, or, instead of tea, a restaurant is always at his elbow. With the same irresponsibility, engagements are broken or kept an hour late; agreements are forfeited or forgotten altogether; order of any sort is unknown, and the only activity of this large class of wealthy people is a hectic, unregulated striving after pleasure.

Women especially grow into hotel fungi of this description, sitting about the hot, over-decorated lobbies and in the huge, crowded restaurants, with nothing to do but stare and be stared at. They are a curious by-product of the energetic, capable American woman in general; and one thinks there might be salvation for them in the “housekeeping” worries they disdainfully repudiate. Still, it cannot be denied that with the serious problem of servants and the exorbitant prices of household commodities a home is far more difficult to maintain in America than in the average modern country. Hospitality under the present conditions presents features slightly careworn; and the New York hostess is apt to be more anxious than charming, and to end her career on the dismal verandas of a sanatorium for nervous diseases.

But society the world round has very much the same character. For types peculiar to a country, one must descend the ladder to rungs nearer the native soil; in New York there are the John Browns of Harlem, for example. No one outside America has heard of Harlem. Does the loyal Englishman abroad speak of Hammersmith? Does the Frenchman en voyage descant on the beauties of the Batignolles? These abominations are locked within the national bosom; only Hyde Park and the Champs Elysées and Fifth Avenue are allowed out for alien gaze. Yet quite as emphatic of New York struggle and achievement as the few score millionaire palaces along the avenue are the tens of thousands of cramped Harlem flats that overspread the northern end of the island from One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street to the Bronx. For tens of thousands of John Browns have daily to wage war in the deadly field of American commercial competition, in order to pay the rent and the gas bill, and the monthly installment on the furniture of these miniature homes. They have not, however, to pay for the electric light, or the hot-water heating, or a dozen other comforts which are a recurring source of amazement to the foreigner in such a place. For twenty dollars a month, John Brown and his wife are furnished not only with three rooms and a luxurious porcelain bath in a white-tiled bathroom; but also the use of two lifts, the inexhaustible services of the janitor, a comfortable roof garden in summer, and an imposing entrance hall downstairs, done in imitation Carrara marble and imitation Cordova leather. With this goes a still more imposing address, and Mrs. John can rouse the eternal envy of the weary Sixth Avenue shop-girl by ordering her lemon-squeezer or two yards of linoleum sent to “Marie Antoinette Court,” or “The Cornwallis Arms.” The shop-girl understands that Mrs. John’s husband is a success.

That is, that he earns in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars a month. With this he can afford to pay the household expenses, to dress himself and his wife a bit better than their position demands, to subscribe to two or three of the ten-cent magazines, and to do a play on Broadway now and then. Mrs. John of course is a matinée fiend, and has the candy habit. These excesses must be provided for; also John’s five-cent cigars and his occasional mild “spree with the boys.” For the rest, they are a prudent couple; methodically religious, inordinately moral; banking a few dollars every month against the menacing rainy-day, and, if this has not arrived by vacation time in August, promptly spending the money on the lurid delights of Atlantic City or some other ocean resort. Thence they return haggard but triumphant, with a coat of tan laboriously acquired by wetting faces and arms, and then sitting for hours in the broiling sun—to impress the Tom Smiths in the flat next door that they have had a “perfectly grand time.”

A naïve, hard-working, kindly couple, severely conventional in their prejudices, impressionable as children in their affections, and with a certain persistent cleverness that shoots beyond the limitations of their type, and hints to them of the habits and manners of a finer. In them the passionate motive of self-development that dominates all American life has so far found an outlet only in demand for the conveniences and material comforts of the further advanced whom they imitate. When in the natural course of things they turn their eyes towards the culture of the Man Higher Up, they will obtain that, too. And meanwhile does not Mrs. Brown have her Tennyson Club, and John his uniform edition of Shakespeare?

Some New Yorkers who shudder at Harlem are not as lucky. I was once the guest of a lady who had just moved into her sumptuous new home on Riverside Drive. My rooms, to quote the first-class hotel circular, were replete with every luxury; I could turn on the light from seven different places; I could make the chairs into couches or the couches into chairs; I could talk by one of the marvellous ebony and silver telephones to the valet or the cook, or if I pleased to Chicago. There was nothing mortal man could invent that had not been put in those rooms, including six varieties of reading-lamps, and a bed-reading-table that shot out and arranged itself obligingly when one pushed a button.

But there was nothing to read. Apologetically, I sought my hostess. Would she allow me to pilfer the library? For a moment the lady looked blank. Then, with a smile of relief, she said: “Of course! You want some magazines. How stupid of the servants. I’ll have them sent to you at once; but you know we have no library. I think books are so ugly, don’t you?”

I am not hopelessly addicted to veracity, but I will set my hand and seal to this story; also to the fact that in all that palace of the superfluous there was not to my knowledge one book of any sort. Even the favourite whipped-cream novel of society was wanting; but magazines of every kind and description littered the place. The reason for this apparently inexplicable state of affairs is simple; time is money; therefore not to be expended without calculation. In the magazine the rushed business man, and the equally rushed business or society woman, has a literary quick-lunch that can be swallowed in convenient bites at odd moments during the day.

Is the business man dining out? He looks at the reviews of books he has not read on the way to his office in the morning; criticisms of plays he has not seen, on the way back at night. Half an hour of magazine is made thus to yield some eight hours of theatre and twenty-four of reading books—and his vis-à-vis at dinner records at next day’s tea party, “what a well-informed man that Mr. Worriton is! He seems to find time for everything.”

Is the society woman “looking in” at an important reception? Between a fitting at her dressmaker’s, luncheon, bridge and two teas, she catches up the last Review from the pocket of her limousine, and runs over the political notes, war news, foreign events of the week. Result: “that Mrs. Newrich is really a remarkable woman!” declares the distinguished guest of the reception to his hostess. “Such a breadth of interest, such an intelligent outlook! It is genuine pleasure to meet a woman who shows some acquaintance with the affairs of the day.”

And so again they hoodwink one another, each practicing the same deceptive game of superficial show; yet none suspecting any of the rest. And the magazine syndicates flourish and multiply. In this piece that is in preparation, the actors are too busy proving themselves capable of their parts really to take time to become so. To succeed with them, you must offer your dose in tabloids: highly concentrated essence of whatever it is, and always sugar-coated. Then they will swallow it promptly, and demand more. Remember, too, that what they want in the way of “culture” is not drama, or literature, or music; but excitement—of admiration, pity, the erotic or the sternly moral sense. Their nerves must be kept at a certain perpetual tension. He who overlooks this supreme fact, in creating for them, fails.

There are in America today some thousands of men and women who have taken the one step further than their fellows in that they realize this, and so are able shrewdly to pander to the national appetites. The result is a continuous outpouring of novels and short stories, plays and hybrid songs, such as in a less vast and less extravagant country would ruin one another by their very multitude; but which in the United States meet with an appalling success. Appalling, because it is not a primitive, but a too exotic, fancy that delights in them. For his mind as for his body, the American demands an overheated dwelling; when not plunged within the hectic details of a “best-seller,” by way of recreation, he is apt to be immersed in the florid joys of a Broadway extravaganza.

These unique American productions, made up of large beauty choruses, magnificent scenery, gorgeous costumes, elaborate fantasies of ballet and song, bear the same relation to actual drama that the best-sellers bear to literature, and are as popular. The Hippodrome, with its huge stage accommodating four hundred people, and its enormous central tank for water spectacles, is easily first among the extravaganza houses of New York. Twice a day an eager audience, drawn from all classes of metropolitan and transient society, crowds the great amphitheatre to the doors. The performance prepared for them is on the order of a French révue: a combination circus and vaudeville, held together by a thin thread of plot that permits the white-flannelled youth and bejewelled maiden, who have faithfully exclaimed over each new sensation of the piece, finally to embrace one another, with the novel cry of “at last!”

Meanwhile kangaroos engage in a boxing match, hippopotami splash most of the reservoir over the “South Sea Girls”; the Monte Carlo Casino presents its hoary tables as background for the “Dance of the Jeunesse Dorée,” and Maoris from New Zealand give an imitation of an army of tarantulas writhing from one side of the stage to another. The climax is a stupendous tableau en pyramide of fountains, marble staircases, gilded thrones, and opalescent canopies; built up, banked, and held together by girls of every costume and complexion. Nothing succeeds in New York without girls; the more there are, the more triumphant the success. So the Hippodrome, being in every way triumphant, has mountains of them: tall girls and little girls, Spanish girls, Japanese girls, Hindoo girls and French girls; and at the very top of the peak, where the “spot” points its dazzling ray, the American girl, wrapped in the Stars and Stripes of her apotheosis. Ecco! The last word has been said; applause thunders to the rafters; the flag is unfurled, to show the maiden in the victorious garb of a Captain of the Volunteers; and the curtain falls amid the lusty strains of the national anthem. Everybody goes home happy, and the box office nets five thousand dollars. They know the value of patriotism, these good Hebrews.

This sentiment, always near the surface with Americans, grows deeper and more fervid as it localizes; leading to a curiously intense snobbism on the part of one section of the country towards another. Thus New York society sniffs at Westerners; let them approach the citadel ever so heavily armed with gold mines, they have a long siege before it surrenders to them. On the other hand, the same society smiles eagerly upon Southerners of no pocket-books at all; and feeds and fêtes and fawns upon them, because they are doomed, the minute their Southern accent is heard, to come of “a good old family.” The idea of a decayed aristocracy in two-hundred-year-old America is not without comedy, but in the States Southerners are taken very solemnly, by themselves as by everyone else.

My friend of the æsthetic antipathy to books (really a delightful person) is a Southerner—or was, before gathered into the fold of the New York Four Hundred. She apologized for taking me to the Horse Show (which she thought might amuse me, however), because “no one goes any more. It’s all Middle West and commuters.” For the benefit of those imperfect in social geography I must explain that Middle West is the one thing worse than West, and that commuters are those unfortunates without the sacred pale, who are forced to journey to and from Manhattan by ferries or underground tubes. They are the butt of comic newspaper supplements, topical songs, and society witticisms; also the despised and over-charged “out-of-town customers” of the haughty Fifth Avenue importer.

For the latter (a phenomenon unique to New York) has her own system of snobbism, quite as elaborate as that of her proudest client. They are really a remarkable mixture of superciliousness and abject servility, these Irish and Hebrew “Madame Celestes,” whose thriving establishments form so conspicuous a part of the important avenue. As exponents of the vagaries of American democracy, they deserve a paragraph to themselves.

Each has her rococo shop, and her retinue of mannequin assistants garbed in the extreme of fashion; each makes her yearly or bi-yearly trip to Paris, from which she returns with strange and bizarre creations, which she assures her patrons are the “only thing” being worn by Parisiennes this season. Now even the untutored male knows that there is never an “only thing” favoured by the capricious and original Parisienne; but that she changes with every wind, and in all seasons wears everything under the sun (including ankle-bracelets and Cubist hats), provided it has the one hall-mark: chic.

But Madame New York meekly accepts the Irish lady’s dictum, and arrays herself accordingly—with what result of extravagant monotony we shall see later on. Enough for the present that she is absolutely submissive to the vulgar taste and iron decrees of the rubicund “Celeste” from Cork, and that the latter alternately condescends and grovels to her, in a manner amazing to the foreigner, who may be looking on. Yet on second thoughts it is quite explicable: after the habit of all Americans, native or naturalized, “Celeste” cannot conceal that she considers herself “as good as” anyone, if not a shade better than some. At the same time, again truly American, she worships the dollars madame represents (and whose aggregate she can quote to a decimal), and respects the lady in proportion. Hence her bewildering combinations of “certainly, Madame—it shall be exactly as Madame orders,” with “Oh, my dear, I wouldn’t have that! Why, girlie, that on you with your dark skin would look like sky-blue on an Indian! But, see, dear, here’s a pretty pink model”—etc., etc.

And so it continues, unctuous deference sandwiched between endearments and snubs throughout the entire conference of shopkeeper and customer; and the latter takes it all as a matter of course, though, if her own husband should venture to disagree with her on any point of judgment, she would be furious with him for a week. When I commented to one lady on these familiar blandishments and criticisms of shop people in New York, she said indulgently: “Oh, they all do it. They don’t mean anything; it’s only their way.”

Yet I have heard that same lady hotly protest against the wife of a Colorado silver magnate (whom she had known for years) daring to address her by her Christian name. “That vulgar Westerner!” she exclaimed; “the next thing she’ll be calling me dear!”

Democracy remains democracy as long as it cannot possibly encroach upon the social sphere; the moment the boundary is passed, however, and the successful “climber” threatens equal footing with the grande dame on the other side, herself still climbing in England or Europe, anathema! The fact is, that Americans, like all other very young people, seek to hide their lack of assurance—social and otherwise—by an aggressive policy of defense which they call independence; but which is verily snobbism of the most virulent brand. From the John Browns to the multimillionaires with daughters who are duchesses, they are intent on emphasizing their own position and its privileges; unconscious that if they themselves were sure of it so would be everyone else.

But inevitably the actors must stumble and stammer, and insert false lines, before finally they shall “feel” their parts, and forge ahead to the victory of finished performance.

III
OFF DUTY

When one ponders what the New Yorker in his leisure hours most enjoys, one answers without hesitation: feeding. The word is not elegant, but neither is the act, as one sees it in process at the mammoth restaurants. Far heavier and more prolonged than mere eating and drinking is this serious cult of food on the part of the average Manhattanite. It has even led to the forming of a distinct “set,” christened by some satirical outsider: “Lobster Society.”

Here are met the moneyed plutocrat and his exuberant “lady friend,” the mauve-waistcoated sporting man, the society déclassée with her gorgeous jewels and little air of tragedy, the expansive Hebrew and his chorus girl, the gauche out-of-town couple with their beaming smiles and last season’s clothes: all that hazy limbo that hovers on the social boundary-line, but hovers futilely—and that seeks to smother its disappointment with elaborate feasts of over-rich food.

Underwood & Underwood

“NEW YORK’S FINEST”: THE FAMOUS MOUNTED POLICE SQUAD

It is amazing the thousands of these people that there are—New York seems to breed them faster than any other type; and the hundreds of restaurants they support. Every hotel has its three or four huge dining-rooms, its Palm Garden, Dutch Grill, etc.; but, as all these were not enough, shrewd Frenchmen and Germans and Viennese have dotted the city with cafés and brauhausen and Little Hungaries, to say nothing of the alarming Egyptian and Turkish abortions that are the favourite erection of the American restaurateur himself.

The typical New York feeding-place from the outside is a palace in terra cotta; from the inside, a vast galleried room or set of rooms, upheld by rose or ochre marble pillars, carpeted with thick red rugs, furnished with bright gilt chairs and heavily damasked, flower-laden tables—the whole interspersed and overtopped and surrounded by a jumble of fountains, gilt-and-onyx Sphinxes, caryatids, centaurs, bacchantes, and heaven knows what else of the superfluous and disassociated. To reach one’s table, one must thread one’s way through a maze of lions couchant, peacocks with spread mother o’ pearl tails, and opalescent dragons that turn out to be lights: proud detail of the “million dollar decorative scheme” referred to in the advertisements of the house. Finally anchored in this sea of sumptuousness, one is confronted with the dire necessity of ordering a meal from a menu that would have staggered Epicurus.

There is the table d’hôte of nine courses—any one of them a meal in itself; or there is the bewildering carte du jour, from which to choose strawberries in December, oranges in May, or whatever collection of ruinous exotics one pleases. The New Yorker himself goes methodically down the list, from oysters to iced pudding; impartial in his recognition of the merits of lobster bisque, sole au gratin, creamed sweetbreads, porterhouse steak, broiled partridge and Russian salad. He sits down to this orgy about seven o’clock, and rises—or is assisted to rise—about ten or half past, unless he is going on to a play, in which case he disposes of his nine courses with the same lightning execution displayed at his quick-lunch, only increasing his drink supply to facilitate the process.

Meanwhile there is the “Neapolitan Quartet,” and the Hungarian Rhapsodist, and the lady in the pink satin blouse who sings “The Rosary,” to amuse our up-to-date Nero. I wonder what the Romans would make of the modern cabaret? Like so many French importations, stripped in transit of their saving coat of French esprit, the cabaret in American becomes helplessly vulgar. Extreme youth cannot carry off the risqué, which requires the salt of worldly wisdom; it only succeeds in being rowdy. And the noisy songs, the loud jokes, the blatant dances—all the spurious clap-trap which in these New York feeding-resorts passes for amusement—point to the most youthful sort of rowdyism: to a popular discrimination still in embryo. But the New Yorker dotes on it—the cabaret, I mean; if for no other reason, because it satisfies his passion for getting his money’s worth. He is ready to pay a handsome price, but he demands handsome return, and no “extras” if you please.

When the ten-cent charge for bread and butter was inaugurated by New York restaurateurs last Spring, their patrons were furious; it hinted of the parsimonious European charge for “cover.” But if the short-sighted proprietors had quietly added five cents to the price of each article on the menu, it would have passed unnoticed: it is not paying that the American minds, it is “being done.” Conceal from him this humiliating consciousness, and he will empty his pockets. Thus, at the theatre, seats are considerably higher than in European cities, but they are also far more comfortable; and include a program, sufficient room for one’s hat and wrap, the free services of the usher, and as many glasses of the beloved ice-water as one cares to call for. People would not tolerate being disturbed throughout the performance by the incessant demands for a “petite service” and other supplements that persecute the Continental theatre-goer; while as for being forced to leave one’s wraps in a garde-robe, and to pay for the privilege of fighting to recover them, the independent American would snort at the bare idea. He insists on a maximum amount of comfort for his money, and on paying for it in a lump sum, either at the beginning or at the end. Convenience, the almighty god, acknowledges no limits to its sway.

It was convenience that until recently made it the custom for the average New York play-goer to appear at the theatre in morning dress. The tired business man could afford to go to the play, but had not the energy to change for it; so, naturally, his wife and daughter did not change either, and the orchestra presented a commonplace aspect, made up of shirtwaists and high-buttoned coats. Now, however, following the example of society, people are beginning to break away from this unattractive austerity; and theatre audiences are enlivened by a sprinkling of light frocks and white shirts.

We have already commented on the most popular type of dramatic amusement in America: the extravaganza, and musical comedy so-called; it is time now to mention the gradually developing legitimate drama, which has its able exponents in Augustus Thomas, Edward Sheldon, Eugene Walter, the late Clyde Fitch, and half a dozen others of no less insight and ability. Their plays present the stirring and highly dramatic scenes of American business and social life (using social in its original sense); and while for the foreigner many of the situations lose their full significance—being peculiar to America, in rather greater degree than French plays are peculiar to France, and English to England—even he must be impressed with the vivid realism and powerful climax of the best American comedies.

The nation as a whole is vehemently opposed to tragedy in any form, and demands of books and plays alike that they invariably shall end well. Such brilliant exceptions as Eugene Walter’s “The Easiest Way” and Sheldon’s “The Nigger,” only prove the rule that the successful piece must have a “happy ending.” High finance plays naturally an important part as nucleus of plots; also the marriage of working girls with scions of the Upper Ten. But the playwright has only to look into the newspapers, in this country of perpetual adventure, to find enough romance and sensation to fill every theatre in New York.

It seems almost as though the people themselves are surfeited with the actual drama that surrounds them, for they are rather languid as an audience, and must be piqued by more and more startling “thrillers” before moved to enthusiasm. Even then their applause is usually directed towards the “star,” in whom they take far keener interest than in the play itself. It is interesting to follow this passionate individualism of the nation that dominates its amusements as well as its activities. The player, not the play’s the thing with Americans; and on theatrical bills the name of the principal actor or actress is always given the largest type, the title of the piece next largest; while the author is tucked away like an afterthought in letters that can just be seen.

The acute American business man, who is always a business man, whether financing a railroad or a Broadway farce, is not slow to profit by the penchant of the public for “big” names. By means of unlimited advertising and the right kind of notoriety, he builds up ordinary actors into valuable theatrical properties. Given a comedian of average talent, average good looks, and an average amount of magnetism, and a clever press agent: he has a star! This brilliant being draws five times the salary of the leading lady of former years (a woman star is obviously a shade or two more radiant than a man), and in return has only to confide her life history and beauty recipés to her adoring public, via the current magazines. Furthermore stars are received with open arms by Society (which leading ladies were not), and may be divorced oftener than other people without injury—rather with distinct advantage—to their reputation. Each new divorce gives a fillip to the public curiosity, and so brings in money to the box office.

Not only in the field of the “legitimate” is a big name the all-important asset of an artist. Ladies who have figured in murder trials, gentlemen whom circumstantial evidence alone has failed to prove assassins, are eagerly sought after by enterprising vaudeville managers, who beg them to accept the paltry sum of a thousand dollars a week, for showing themselves to curious crowds, and delivering a ten-minute monologue on the deficiencies of American law! How or why the name has become “big” is a matter of only financial moment; and Americans of rigid respectability flock to stare at ex-criminals, members of the under-world temporarily in the limelight, and young persons whose sole claim to distinction lies in the glamour shed by one-time royal favour. Thanks to press agents and newspapers, the affairs of this motley collection—as indeed of “stars” of every lustre—are so constantly and so intimately before the public, that one hears people of all classes discussing them as though they were their lifelong friends.

Thus at the theatre: “Oh, no, the play isn’t anything, but I come to see Laura Lee. Isn’t she stunning? You ought to see her in blue—she says herself blue’s her colour. I don’t think much of these dresses she’s wearing tonight; she got them at Héloïse’s. Now generally she gets her things at Robert’s—she says Robert just suits her genre.”

Again, at the restaurant: “How seedy May Morris is looking—there she is, over by the window. You know she divorced her first husband because he made her pay the rent, and now she’s leading a cat-and-dog life with this one because he’s jealous of the manager. That’s Mrs. Willy Spry who just spoke to her; well, I didn’t know she knew her!”

What they do not know about celebrities of all sorts would be hard to teach Americans, particularly the women. They can tell you how many eggs Caruso eats for breakfast, and describe to the last rosebush Maude Adams’ country home; their interest in the drama and music these people interpret trails along tepidly, in wake of their worship for the successful individual. Americans are not a musical people. They go to opera because it is fashionable to be seen there, and to concerts and recitals for the most part because they confer the proper æsthetic touch. But only a handful have any real knowledge or love of music, and that handful is continually crucified by the indifference of the rest. I can think of no more painful experience for a sincere music-lover than to attend a performance at the Metropolitan Opera; and this not only because people are continually coming in and going out, destroying the continuity of the piece, but because the latter itself is carelessly executed and often faulty. Here again the quartet of exorbitantly paid stars are charged with the success of the entire performance; the conductor is an insignificant quantity, and the chorus goes its lackadaisical way unheeded—even smiling and exchanging remarks in the background, with no one the wiser. From a box near the stage I once saw two priests in “Aïda” jocosely tweak one another’s beards just at the moment of the majestic finale. Why not? The audience, if it pays attention to the opera at all, pays it to Caruso and Destinn and Homer—to the big name and the big voice; not to petty detail such as chorus and mise-en-scène.

But of course opera is the last thing for which people buy ten-dollar seats at the Metropolitan. The “Golden Horse-Shoe” is the spectacle they pay to see; the masterpieces of Céleste and Héloïse (as exhibited by Madame Millions and her intimates) rather than the masterpieces of Wagner or Puccini lure them within the great amphitheatre. And certain it is that the famous double tier of boxes boasts more beautiful women, gorgeously arrayed, than any other place of assembly in America. Yet as I first saw them, from my modest seat in the orchestra, they appeared to be a collection of radiant Venuses sitting in gilded bathtubs: above the high box-rail, only rows of gleaming shoulders, marvellously dressed heads, and winking jewels were visible. Later, in the foyer, I discovered that some of them at least were more modernly attired than the lady who rose from the sea, but the first impression has always remained the more vivid.

Society—ever deliciously naïve in airing its ignorance—is heard to express some quaint criticisms at opera. At a performance of Tristan, I sat next a débutante who had the reputation of being “musical.” In the midst of the glorious second act, she whispered plaintively, “I do hate it when our night falls on Tristan—it’s such a sad story!”

It will be interesting to follow New York musical education, if the indefatigable Mr. Hammerstein succeeds in his present proposal to offer the lighter French and Italian operas at popular prices. Hitherto music along with every other art in America has been so commercialized that wealth rather than appreciation and true fondness has controlled it. But meanwhile there has developed, instinctively and irrepressibly, the much disparaged ragtime. It is the pose among musical précieux loudly to decry any suggestion of ragtime as a national art; yet the fact remains that it has grown up spontaneously as the popular and the only distinctly American form of musical expression. Of course, the old shuffling clog-dances of the negroes were responsible for it in the beginning. I was visiting some Americans in Tokio when a portfolio of the “new music” was sent out to them (1899), and I remember that it consisted entirely of cakewalks and “coon songs,” with negro titles and pictures of negroes dancing, on the cover. But this has long since ceased to be characteristic of ragtime as a whole, which takes its inspiration from every phase of nervous, precipitate American life.

In the jerky, syncopated measures, one can almost hear between beats the familiar rush of feet, hurrying along—stumbling—halting abruptly—only to fly ahead faster. Ragtime is the pell-mell, helter-skelter, headlong spirit of America expressed in tune; and no other people, however charmed by its peculiar fascination and wild swing, can play or dance to it like Americans. It is instinctive with them; where classical music, so called, is a laboriously acquired taste.

New Yorkers in particular take their artistic hobbies very seriously; not only music and the conventional arts, but all those occult and mystic off-shoots that abound wherever there are idle people. To assuage the ennui that dogs excessive wealth, they devote themselves to all sorts of cults and intricate beliefs. Swamis, crystal-gazers, astrologers, mind-readers, and Messiahs of every kind and colour reap a luxurious harvest in New York. Women especially have a new creed for every month in the year; and discuss “the aura,” and “the submerged self,” and the “spiritual significance of colour,” with profound solemnity. On being presented to a lady, you are apt to be asked your birth date, the number of letters in your Christian name, your favourite hue, and other momentous questions that must be cleared away before acquaintance can proceed, or even begin at all.

“John?” cries the lady. “I knew you were a John, the minute I saw you! Now, what do you think I am?”

You are sure to say a “Mabel” where she is an “Edith,” or a Gladys where she is a Helen, or to commit some other blunder which takes the better part of an hour to be explained to you. Week-end parties are perfect hot-beds of occultism, each guest striving to out-argue every other in the race to gain proselytes for his religion of the moment.

The American house-party on the whole is a much more serious affair than its original English model. The anxious American hostess never quite gains that casual, easy manner of putting her house at the disposal of her guests, and then forgetting it and them. She must be always “entertaining,” than which there is no more dreary persecution for the long-suffering visitor. Except for this, her hospitality is delightful; and it is a joy to leave the dust and roar of New York, and motor out to one of the many charming country houses on Long Island or up the Hudson for a peaceful week-end. Americans show great good sense in clinging to their native Colonial architecture, which lends itself admirably to the simple, well-kept lawns and old-fashioned gardens. In comparison with country estates of the old world, one misses the dignity of ancient stone and trees; but gains the airy openness and many luxuries of modern comfort.

As for country life in general, it is further advanced than on the Continent, but not so far advanced as in England. Americans, being a young people, are naturally an informal people, however they may rig themselves out when they are on show. They love informal clothes, and customs, and the happy-go-lucky freedom of out-of-doors. On the other hand, they are not a sporting people, except by individuals. They are athletes rather than sportsmen; the passion for individual prowess being very strong, the devotion to sport for sport’s sake much less in evidence. The spirit of competition is as keen in the athletic field as it is in Wall Street; and at the intercollegiate games enthusiasm is always centred on the particular hero of each side, rather than on the play of the team as a whole. The American in general distinguishes himself in the “individual” rather than the team sports—in running, swimming, skating, and tennis; all of which display to fine advantage his wiry, lean agility.

At the same time, there is nothing more typically American or more inspiring to watch than one of the great collegiate team games, when thirty thousand spectators are massed round the field, breathlessly intent on every detail. Even in an immense city like New York, on the day of a big game, one feels a peculiar excitement in the air. The hotels are full of eager boys with sweaters, through the streets dash gaily decorated motors, and the stations are crowded with fathers, mothers, sisters and sweethearts on their way to cheer their particular hopeful. For once, too, the harassed man of affairs throws business to the four winds, remembers only that he is an “old grad” of Harvard or Princeton or Yale, and hurries off to cheer for his Alma Mater.

Then at the field there are the two vast semicircles of challenging colours, the advance “rooting”—the songs, yells, ringing of bells and tooting of horns—that grows to positive frenzy as the two contesting teams come in and take their places. And, as the game proceeds, the still more fervent shouts—middle-aged men standing up on their seats and bawling three-times-threes, young girls laughing, crying, splitting their gloves in madness of applause, small boys screeching encouragement to “our side,” withering taunts to the opponents; and then all at once a deathly hush—in such a huge congregation twice as impressive as all their noise—while a goal is made or a home base run. And the enthusiasm breaks forth more furious than ever.

We are a long way now from the stodgy, dull-eyed diner-out, in his murky lair; now, we are looking on at youth at its best—its most eager and unconscious; in which guise Americans in their vivid charm are irresistible.

IV
MISS NEW YORK, JR.

There is no woman in modern times of whom so much has been written, so little said, as of the American woman. Essayists have echoed one another in pronouncing her the handsomest, the best dressed, the most virtuous, and altogether the most attractive woman the world round. Psychologists have let her carefully alone; she is not a simple problem to expound. She is, however, a most interesting one, and I have not the courage to slight her with the usual cursory remarks on eyes, hair, and figure. She deserves a second and more searching glance.

To her own countrymen she is a goddess on a pedestal that never totters; to the foreigner she is a pretty, restless, thoroughly selfish female, who roams the earth at scandalous liberty, while her husband sits at home and posts checks. Naturally, the truth—if one can get at truth regarding such a complex creature—falls between these two conceptions: the American woman is a splendid, faulty human being, in whom the extremes of human weakness and nobility seem surely to have met. She is the product of the extreme Western philosophy of absolute individualism, and as such is constituted a law unto herself, which she defies the world to gainsay. At the same time she knows herself so little that she changes and contradicts this law constantly, thus bewildering those who are trying to understand it and her.

For example, we are convinced of her independence. We go with her to the milliner’s. She wants a hat with plumes. “Oh, but, my dear,” says the saleslady reprovingly, “they aren’t wearing plumes this season—they aren’t wearing them at all. Everybody is having Paradise feathers.” Madame New York instantly declares that in that case she must have Paradise feathers, too, and is thoroughly content when the same are added to the nine hundred and ninety-nine other feathers that flutter out the avenue next afternoon. Plumes may be far more becoming to her; in her heart she may secretly regret them; but she must have what everyone else has. She has not the independence to break away from the herd.

And so it is with all her costume, her coiffure, the very bag on her wrist and brooch at her throat: every detail must be that detail of the type. She neither dares nor knows how to be different. But, within the stronghold of the type, she dares anything. Are “they” wearing narrow skirts? Every New York woman challenges every other, with her frock three inches tighter than the last lady’s. Are they slashing skirts to the ankle in Paris? Madame New York slashes hers to the shoe-tops, always provided she has the concurrence of “those” of Manhattan. Once secured by the sanction of the mass, her instinct for exaggeration is unleashed; her perverse imagination shakes off its chronic torpor, and soars to flights of fearful and wonderful audacity.

Even then, however, she originates no fantasy of her own, but simply elaborates and enlarges upon the primary copy. Her impulse is not to think and create, but to observe and assimilate. It would never occur to her to study the lines of her head and arrange her hair accordingly; rather she studies the head of her next-door neighbour, and promptly duplicates it—generally with distinct improvement over the original. True to her race, she has a genius for imitation that will not be subdued. But she is not an artist.

For this reason, the American woman bores us with her vanity, where the Englishwoman rouses our tenderness, and the Frenchwoman piques and allures. There is an appealing clumsiness in the way the Englishwoman goes about adding her little touches of feminine adornment; the badly tied bow, the awkward bit of lace, making their deprecating bid for favour. The Frenchwoman, with her seductive devices of alternate concealment and daring displays, lays constant emphasis on the two outstanding charms of all femininity: mystery and change. But when we come to the American woman we are confronted with that most depressing of personalities, the stereotyped. She has made of herself a mannequin for the exposition of expensive clothes, costly jewels, and a mass of futile accessories that neither in themselves nor as pointers to an individuality signify anything whatsoever. This figure of set elegance she has overlaid with a determined animation that is never allowed to flag, but keeps the puppet in an incessant state of laughing, smiling, chattering—motion of one sort or another—till we long for the machinery to run down, and the show to be ended.

But this never occurs, except when the entire elaborate mechanism falls to pieces with a crash; and the woman becomes that wretched, sexless thing—a nervous wreck. Till then, to use her own favourite expression, “she will go till she drops,” and the onlooker is forced to watch her in the unattractive process.

Of course the motive of this excessive activity on the part of American men and women alike is the passionate wish to appear young. As in the extreme East age is worshipped, here in the extreme West youth constitutes a religion, of which young women are the high priestesses. Far from moving steadily on to a climax in ripe maturity, life for the American girl reaches its dazzling apex when she is eighteen or twenty; this, she is constantly told by parents, teachers and friends, is the golden period of her existence. She is urged to make the most of every precious minute; and everything and everybody must be sacrificed in helping her to do it.

As a matter of course, she is given the most comfortable room in the house, the prettiest clothes, the best seat at the theatre. As a matter of course, she accepts them. Why should it occur to her to defer to age, when age anxiously and at every turn defers to her? Oneself as the pivot of existence is far more interesting than any other creature; and it is all so brief. Soon will come marriage, with its tiresome responsibilities, its liberty curtailed, and children, the forerunners of awful middle age. Laugh, dance, and amuse yourself today is the eternal warning in the ears of the American girl; for tomorrow you will be on the shelf, and another generation will have come into your kingdom.

The young lady is not slow to hear the call—or to follow it. With feverish haste, she seizes her prerogative of queen of the moment, and demands the satisfaction of her every caprice. Her tastes and desires regulate the diversion and education of the community. What she favours succeeds; what she frowns on fails. A famous American actress told me that she traced her fortune to her popularity with young girls. “I never snub them,” she said; “when they write me silly letters, I answer them. I guard my reputation to the point of prudishness, so that I may meet them socially, and invite them to my home. They are the talisman of my career. It matters little what I play—if the young girls like me, I have a success.”

The wise theatrical manager, however, is differently minded. He, too, has his harvests to reap from the approval of Miss New York, Jr., and arranges his program accordingly. Thus the American play-goer is treated to a series of musical comedies, full of smart slang scrappily composed round a hybrid waltz; so-called “society plays,” stocked with sumptuous clothes, many servants, and shallow dialogue; unrecognizable “adapted” pieces, expurgated not only of the risqué, but of all wit and local atmosphere as well; and finally the magnificently vacuous extravaganza: this syrup and mush is regularly served to the theatre-going public, and labelled “drama”! Yet thousands of grown men and women meekly swallow it—even come to prefer it—because Mademoiselle Miss so decrees.

She also is originally responsible for the multitude of “society novels,” vapid short stories, and profusely illustrated gift books, which make up the literature of modern America. On her altar is the vulgar “Girl Calendar,” the still more vulgar poster; flaunting her self-conscious prettiness from every shop window, every subway and elevated book-stall. She is displayed to us with dogs, with cats, in the country, in town, getting into motors, getting out of boats, driving a four-in-hand, or again a vacuum cleaner—for she is indispensable to the advertising agent. Her fixed good looks and studied poses have invaded the Continent; and even in Spain, in the sleepy old town of Toledo, among the grave prints of Velasquez and Ribera, I came across the familiar pert silhouette with its worshipping-male counterpart, and read the familiar title: “At the Opera.”

From all this superficial self-importance, whether of her own or her elders’ making, one might easily write the American girl down as a vain, empty-headed nonentity, not worth thoughtful consideration. On the contrary, she decidedly is worth it. Behind her arrogance and foolish affectations is a mind alert to stimulus, a heart generous and warm to respond, a spirit brave and resourceful. It takes adversity to prove the true quality of this girl, for then her arrogance becomes high determination; her absurdities fall from her, like the cheap cloak they are, and she takes her natural place in the world as a courageous, clear-sighted woman.

I believe that among the working girls is to be found the finest and most distinct type of American woman. This sounds a sweeping statement, and one difficult to substantiate; but let us examine it. Whence are the working girls of New York recruited? From the families of immigrants, you guess at once. Only a very small fraction. The great majority come from American homes, in the North, South, or Middle West, where the fathers have failed in business, or died, or in some other way left the daughters to provide for themselves.

The first impulse, on the part of the latter, is to go to New York. If you are going to hang yourself, choose a big tree, says the Talmud; and Americans have written it into their copy-books forever. Whether they are to succeed or fail, they wish to do it in the biggest place, on the biggest scale they can achieve. The girl who has to earn her living, therefore, establishes herself in New York. And then begins the struggle that is the same for women the world over, but which the American girl meets with a sturdiness and obstinate ambition all her own.

She may have been the pampered darling of a mansion with ten servants; stoutly now she takes up her abode in a “third floor back,” and becomes her own laundress. For it is part of all the contradictions of which she is the unit that, while the most recklessly extravagant, she is also, when occasion demands, the most practical and saving of women. Her scant six or seven dollars a week are carefully portioned out to yield the utmost value on every penny. She walks to and from her work, thus saving ten cents and doing benefit to her complexion at the same time in the tingling New York air. In the shop or office she is quiet, competent, marvellously quick to seize and assimilate the details of a business which two months ago she had never heard of. Without apparent effort, she soon makes herself invaluable, and then comes the thrilling event of her first “raise.”

I am talking always of the American girl of good parentage and refinement, who is the average New York business girl; not of the gum-chewing, haughty misses of stupendous pompadour and impertinence, who condescend to wait on one in the cheaper shops. The average girl is sinned against rather than sinning, in the matter of impudence. Often of remarkable prettiness, and always of neat and attractive appearance, she has not only the usual masculine advances to contend with, but also the liberties of that inter-sex freedom peculiar to America. The Englishman or the European never outgrows his first rude sense of shock at the promiscuous contact between men and women, not only allowed, but taken as a matter of course in the new country. To see an employé, passing through a shop, touch a girl’s hand or pat her on the shoulder, while delivering some message or order, scandalizes the foreigner only less than the girl’s nonchalant acceptance of the familiarity.

But among these people there is none of the sex consciousness that pervades older civilizations. Boys and girls, instead of being strictly segregated from childhood, are brought up together in frank intimacy. Whether the result is more or less desirable, in the young man and young woman, the fact remains that the latter are quite without that sex sensitiveness which would make their mutual attitude impossible in any other country. If the girl in the shop resents the touch of the young employé, it is not because it is a man’s touch, but because it is (as she considers) the touch of an inferior. I know this to be true, from having watched young people in all classes of American society, and having observed the unvarying indifference with which these caresses are bestowed and received. Indeed it is slanderous to call them caresses; rather are they the playful motions of a lot of young puppies or kittens.

The American girl therefore is committing no breach of dignity when she allows herself to be touched by men who are her equals. But I have noticed time and again that the moment those trifling attentions take on the merest hint of the serious, she is on guard—and formidable. Having been trained all her life to take care of herself (and in this she is truly and admirably independent), without fuss or unnecessary words she proceeds to put her knowledge to practical demonstration. The following conversation, heard in an upper Avenue shop, is typical:

“Morning, Miss Dale. Say, but you’re looking some swell today—that waist’s a peach! (The young floor-walker lays an insinuating hand on Miss Dale’s sleeve.) How’d you like to take in a show tonight?”

“Thank you, I’m busy tonight.”

“Well, then, tomorrow?”

“I’m busy tomorrow night, too.”

“Oh, all right, make it Friday—any night you say.”

Miss Dale leaves the gloves she has been sorting, to face the floor-walker squarely across the counter. “Look here, Mr. Barnes; since you can’t take a hint, I’ll give it you straight from the shoulder: you’re not my kind, and I’m not yours. And the sooner that’s understood between us, the better for both. Good morning.”

Here is none of the hesitating reserve of the English or French woman under the same circumstances, but a frank, downright declaration of fact; infinitely more convincing than the usual stumbling feminine excuses. It may be added that, while the American girl in a shop is generally a fine type of creature, the American man in a shop is generally inferior. Otherwise he would “get out and hustle for a bigger job.” His feminine colleagues realize this, and are apt to despise him in consequence. Certainly there is little of any over-intimacy between shop men and girls; and the demoralizing English system of “living-in” does not exist.

But there is a deeper reason for the general morality of the American working girl: her high opinion of herself. This passion (for it is really that), which in the girl of idle wealth shows itself in cold selfishness and meaningless adornment, in her self-dependent sister reaches the point of an ideal. When the American girl goes into business, it is not as a makeshift until she shall marry, or until something else turns up; it is because she has confidence in herself to make her own life, and to make it a success. The faint heart and self-mistrust which work the undoing of girls of this class in other nations have no place in the character of Miss America. Resolutely she fixes her goal, and nothing can stop her till she has attained it. Failure, disappointment, rebuff only seem to steel her purpose stronger; and, if the worst comes to worst, nine times out of ten she will die rather than acknowledge herself beaten by surrendering to a man.

But she dies hard, and has generally compassed her purpose long since. It may be confined to rising from “notions” to “imported models” in a single shop; or it may be running the gamut from office girl to head manager of an important business. No matter how ambitious her aspiration, or the seeming impossibility of it, the American girl is very apt to get what she wants in the end. She has the three great assets for success: pluck, self-confidence, and keen wits; and they carry her often far beyond her most daring dreams of attainment.

My friend, Cynthia Brand, is an example. She came to New York when she was twenty-two, with thirty dollars and an Idea. The idea was to design clothes for young girls between the ages of twelve and twenty; clothes that should be at once simple and distinguished, and many miles removed from the rigid commonplaceness of the “Misses’ Department.” All very well, but where was the shop, the capital, the clientèle? In the tip of Cynthia’s pencil.

She had two or three dozen sketches and one good tailored frock. Every American woman who is successful begins with a good tailored frock. Cynthia put hers on, took her sketches under her arm, and went to the best dressmaking establishment in New York. That is another characteristic of American self-appreciation: they always go straight to the best. The haughty forewoman was bored at first, but when she had languidly inspected a few of Cynthia’s sketches she was roused to interest if not enthusiasm. Two days later, Cynthia took her position as “designer for jeunne filles” at L——’s, at a salary which even for New York was considerable.

Hence the capital. The clientèle developed inevitably, and was soon excuse in itself for the girl to start a place of her own. At the end of her third year in New York, she saw her dream of independence realized in a chic little shop marked Brand; at the end of her fifth the shop had evolved into an establishment of three stories. And ten years after the girl with her thirty dollars arrived at an East Side boarding-house, she put up a sky-scraper—at any rate an eleven-story building—of her own; while the hall bedroom at the boarding-house is become a beautiful apartment on Central Park West. And meanwhile someone made the discovery that Cynthia Brand was one of the Brands of Richmond, and Society took her up. Today she is a personage, as well as one of the keenest business women, in New York.

Marvellous, but a unique experience, you say. Unique only in degree of success, not in the fact itself. There are hundreds, even thousands, of Cynthia Brands plying their prosperous trades in the American commercial capital. As photographers, decorators, restaurant and tea-room proprietors, jewellers, florists, and specialists of every kind, these enterprising women are calmly proving that the home is by no means their only sphere; that in the realm of economics at least they are the equals both in energy and intelligence of their comrade man.

It is interesting to contrast this strongly feminist attitude of the American woman with the suffragism of her militant British sister. No two methods of obtaining the same result could be more different. Years ago the American woman emancipated herself, without ostentation or outcry, by quietly taking her place in the commonwealth as a bread-winner. Voluntarily she stepped down from the pedestal (to which, however, her sentimental confrère promptly re-raised her), and set about claiming her share in the business of life. To disregard her now would be futile. She is too important; she has made herself too vital a factor in economic activity to be disregarded when it comes to civic matters.

And so, while Englishwomen less progressive in the true sense of the word have been window-smashing and setting fires, the “rights” they so ardently desire have been tranquilly and naturally acquired by their shrewder American cousins. Fifteen of the forty-odd States now have universal suffrage; almost every State has suffrage in some form. And it will be a very short time—perhaps ten years, perhaps fifteen—until all of the great continent will come under the equal rule of men and women alike.

I had the interesting privilege of witnessing the mammoth Suffrage Parade in New York, just before the presidential election last fall. In more than one way, it was a revelation. After the jeering, hooting mob at the demonstrations in Hyde Park, this absorbed, respectful crowd that lined both sides of Fifth Avenue was even more impressive than the procession of women itself. But seeing the latter as they marched past twenty thousand strong gave the key to the enthusiasm of the crowd. A fresh-faced, well-dressed, composed company of women; women of all ages—college girls, young matrons, middle-aged mothers with their daughters, elderly ladies and even dowagers, white-haired and hearty, made up the inspiring throng. They greeted the cheers of the spectators smilingly, yet with dignity; their own cheers no less ardent for being orderly and restrained; and about their whole bearing was a sanity and good sense, joined to a thoroughly feminine wish to please, which gave away the secret of their popularity.

It was the American woman at her best, which means the American woman with a steady, splendid purpose which she intends to accomplish, and in which she enlists not only the support but the sympathy of her fellow-men. With her own unique cleverness she goes about it. President-elect Wilson stole into Washington the day before his inauguration, almost unnoticed, because everyone was off to welcome “General” Rosalie Jones and her company of petitioners: instead of kidnapping the President (as her English sisters would have planned), the astute young woman kidnapped the people; winning them entirely by her sturdy good humour and daring combined, and refusing to part with a jot of her femininity in the process.

If I have seemed to contradict myself in this brief analysis of so complex and interesting a character as the American woman, I can only go back to my first statement that she herself is a contradiction—only definite within her individual type. The type of the mere woman of pleasure, which implies the woman of wealth, I confess to finding the extreme of vapidity and selfishness, as Americans are always the extreme of something. This is the type the foreigner knows by heart, and despises. But the American woman of intelligence, the woman of clear vision, fine aim, and splendid accomplishment, he does not know; for she is at home, earning her living.

Underwood & Underwood

AMERICAN WOMAN GOES TO WAR!
(MARCH OF THE SUFFRAGISTS ON WASHINGTON)

V
MATRIMONY & CO.

Of all the acts which America has in solution, marriage is as yet the most unsatisfactory, the least organized. It is easy to dismiss it with a vague wave of the hand, and the slighting “Oh, yes—the divorce evil.” But really to understand the problem, with all its complex difficulties, one must go a great deal further—into the thought and simple animal feeling of the people who harbour the divorce evil.

Physiologically speaking, Americans are made up of nerves; psychologically they are made up of sentiment: a volatile combination, fatal to steadiness or logic of expression. We have spoken of the everyday habit of contact among them, the trifling touch that passes unheeded between young men and girls, from childhood into maturity. This is but a single phase of that diffuseness of sex energy, which being distributed through a variety of channels, with the American, nowhere is very profound or vital. The constant comradeship between the two sexes, from babyhood throughout all life, makes for many fine things; but it does not make for passion. And, as though dimly they realize this, Americans—both men and women—seem desperately bent on manufacturing it.

Hence their suggestive songs, their suggestive books, their crudely suggestive plays, and, above all, their recognized game of “teasing,” in which the young girl uses every device for plaguing the young man—to lead him on, but never to lead him too far. Always suggestion, never realization; as a nation they retain the adolescent point of view to the end, playing with sex, which they do not understand, but only vaguely feel, yet about which they have the typically adolescent curiosity.

So much for the physiological side. It is not hard to understand how under such conditions natural animal energy is dissipated along a hundred avenues of mere nerve excitement and satisfaction; so that when it comes to marriage the American man or woman can have no stored-up wealth of passion to bestow, but simply the usual comradeship, the usual contact intensified. This is all very well, to begin with, but it is too slender a bond to stand the strain of daily married life. Besides, there is the ingrained craving for novelty that has been fed and fostered by lifelong freedom of intercourse until it is become in itself a passion dangerously strong. A few misunderstandings, a serious quarrel or two, and the couple who a year ago swore to cleave to one another till death are eager to part with one another for life—and to pass on to something new.

But a formidable stumbling-block confronts them: their ideal of marriage. Sentiment comes to the front, outraged and demanding appeasement. American life is grounded in sentiment. The idea of the American man concerning the American woman, the idea of the woman concerning the man, is a colossus of sentiment in itself. She is all-pure, he is all-chivalrous. She would not smoke a cigarette (in public) because he would be horrified; he would not confess to a liason (however many it might please him to enjoy), because she would perish with shame. Each has made it a life business to forget that the other is human, and to insist that both are impeccable. When, therefore, before the secret tribunal of matrimony, this illusion is condemned to death, what is to be done?

Nothing that could reflect on the innocence of the woman, or the blamelessness of the man. In other words, the public ideal still must be upheld. With which the public firmly agrees; and, always willing to be hoodwinked and to hoodwink itself, makes a neat series of laws whereby men and women may enjoy unlimited license and still remain irreproachable. Thus the difficulty is solved, sentiment is satisfied, and chaos mounts the throne.

I am always extremely interested in the American disgust at the Continental marriage system. Here the inveterate sentimentalism of the nation comes out most decided and clear. In the first place, they say, the European has no respect for women; he orders them about, or betrays them, with equal coolness and cruelty. He is mercenary to the last degree in the matter of the dot, but himself after marriage makes no effort to provide his wife with more than pin-money. After the honeymoon she becomes his housekeeper and the mother of his children; while he spends her dowry on a succession of mistresses and immoral amusements elsewhere.

All of which, as generalization, is true. The complementary series of facts, however, the American complacently ignores. He knows nothing, for instance, of the European attitude to the young girl—how could he? His own sisters and daughters are presented, even before they are in long skirts, as objects of intimacy and flirtation; harmless flirtation, admitted, yet scarcely the thing to produce reverence for the recipient. Instead she is given a free-and-easy consideration, which to the European is appalling. The latter may be a rake and a debauché, but he has one religion ingrained and unimpeachable: in the presence of a young girl he is before an altar. And throughout all European life the young girl is accorded a delicate dignity impossible to her less sheltered American cousin.

What good does that do her, asks the downright American, if the minute she marries she becomes a slave? On the contrary, she gains her liberty, where the American girl (in her own opinion at least) loses hers; but even if she did not it is a matter open to dispute as to which is better off in any case: the woman who is a slave, or the woman who is master? For contentment and serenity, one must give the palm to the European. She brings her husband money instead of marrying him for his; she stands over herself and her expenditure, rather than over him and his check-book; and she tends her house and bears children, rather than roams the world in search of pleasure. Yet she is happy.

She may be deceived by her husband; if so, she is deceived far without the confines of her own home. Within her home, as mother of her husband’s children, she is impregnable. She may be betrayed, but she is never vulgarized; her affairs are not dragged through the divorce court, or jaunted about the columns of a yellow press. Whatever she may not be to the man whom she has married, she is once and forever the woman with whom he shares his name, and to whom he must give his unconditional respect—or kill her. She has so much, sure and inviolate, to stand on.

The American woman has nothing sure. In a land where all things change with the sun, die and are shoved along breathlessly to make room for new, she is lost in the general confusion. Today she is Mrs. Smith, tomorrow—by her own wish, or Mr. Smith’s, or both—she is Mrs. Jones, six months later she is Mrs. Somebody Else; and the conversation, which includes “your children,” “my children,” and “our children,” is not a joke in America: it is an everyday fact—for the children themselves a tragedy.

Young people grow up among such conditions with a flippant—even a horrible—idea of marriage. They look upon it, naturally, as an expedient; something temporarily good, to be entered upon as such, and without any profound thought for the future. “She married very well,” means she married dollars, or position, or a title; in the person of what, it does not matter. If she is dissatisfied with her bargain, she always makes an exchange, and no one will think any the worse of her. For, while Americans are horror-stricken at the idea of a woman’s having a lover without the law, within the law she may have as many as she likes, and take public sympathy and approval along with her; so long as the farce of her purity is carried out, these sentimentalists (whom Meredith calls, in general, “self-worshippers”) smile complaisance.

It is simply another light on the prevailing superficiality that controls them, for that a woman shall be faithful—where she has placed her affections of whatever sort—they neither demand nor appear to think of at all. She may ruin her husband buying chiffons, or maintaining an establishment beyond his means, and not a word of blame is attached to her; on the contrary, when the husband goes bankrupt, it is he who is outcast, while everyone speaks pitifully of “his poor wife.” The only allegiance expected of the woman is the mere allegiance of the body; and this in the American woman is no virtue, for she has little or no passion to tempt her to bodily sin.

Rather, as we have seen, she is a highly nervous organism, demanding nerve food in the shape of sensation—constant and varied. Emotionally, she is a sort of psychic vampire, always athirst for victims to her vanity; experience from which to gain new knowledge of herself. This is true not only of the idle woman of society, but of the best and intentionally most sincere. They are wholly unconscious of it, they would indignantly refute it; yet their very system of living proves it: throughout all classes the American woman, in the majority, is sufficient unto herself, and—no matter in how noble a spirit—self-absorbed.

If she is happily married, she loves her husband; but why? Because he harmoniously complements the nature she is bent on developing. In like fashion she loves her children—do they not contribute a tremendous portion towards the perfect womanhood she ardently desires? And this is not saying that the finer type of American woman is not a devoted mother and wife; it is giving the deep, unconscious motive of her devotion.

But take the finer type that is not married, that remains unmarried voluntarily, and by the thousands. Take the Cynthia Brands, for example. Americans say they stay single because “they have too good a time,” and this is literally true. Why should they marry when they can compass of themselves the things women generally marry for—secure position and a comfortable home? Why, except for overpowering love of some particular man? This the Cynthia Brands—i. e., women independently successful—are seldom apt to experience. All their energy is trained upon themselves and their ambition; and that is never satisfied, but pushes on and on, absorbing emotion—every sort of force in the woman—till her passion becomes completely subjective, and marriage has nothing to offer her save the children she willingly renounces.

Thus there is in America almost a third sex: a sex of superwomen, in whom mentality triumphs to the sacrifice of the normal female. One cannot say that this side of the generally admirable “self-made” woman is appealing. It is rather hard, and leads one to speculate as to whether the victorious bachelor girl of today is on the whole more attractive or better off than the despised spinster of yesterday. Of course, she has raised and strengthened the position of women, economically speaking; socially, too. But one cannot but think that she is after all only a partially finished superwoman, and that the ultimate creature will have more of sweetness and strong tenderness than one sees in the determined, rather rigid faces of the army of New York business women of the present.

As for the New York man (whom one is forever slighting because his rôle is so inconspicuous), we have a type much less complex—quite the simplest type of normal male, in fact. The average New Yorker (that is, the New Yorker of the upper middle class) is a hard-working, obvious soul, of obvious qualities and obvious flaws. His raison d’être is to provide prodigally for his wife and children; to which end he steals out of the house in the morning before the rest are awake, and returns late in the evening, hurriedly to dress and accompany Madame to some smart restaurant and the play.

Underwood & Underwood

THE TRIUMPHANT “THIRD SEX” TAKES WASHINGTON

Here, as at the opera or fashionable reception, his duty is simply that of background to the elaborate gorgeousness and inveterate animation of his womenfolk. Indeed, throughout all their activities the American husband and wife seem curiously irrelevant to one another: they work as a tandem, not as a team. And there is no question as to who goes first. The wife indicates the route; the husband does his best to keep up to her. If he cannot do it, no matter what his other excellences, he is a failure. He himself is convinced of it, hence his tense expression of straining every nerve toward some gigantic end that usually he is just able to compass.

The man who cannot support a woman, not in reasonable comfort, but in the luxury she expects, thinks he has no right to her. The woman has taught him to think it. Thus a young friend of mine, who on twenty-five thousand a year had been engaged to a charming New York girl, told me, simply, that of course when his income was reduced to five thousand he could not marry her.

I asked what the girl thought about it. “Oh, she’s a trump,” he said enthusiastically; “she wouldn’t throw me over because I’ve lost my money. But of course she sees it’s impossible. We couldn’t go the pace.”

From which ingenuous confession we rightly gather that “the pace” comes first with both husband and wife, in New York; the person of one another second, if it counts at all. Their great bond of union is the building up of certain material circumstances both covet; their home life, their friends, their instinctive and lavish hospitality—everything is regulated according to this. Instead of a peaceful evening in their own drawing-room, after the man’s strenuous day at the office, the woman’s no less strenuous day at bridge and the dressmaker’s, they must rush into evening clothes and hasten to show themselves where they should be seen. Other people’s pleasures become to the American couple stern duties; to be feverishly followed, if it helps them in ever so little toward their goal.

Thus we hear Mrs. Grey say to George: “Don’t forget we’re dining with the Fred Baynes’ tonight. Be home early.”

“The deuce we are!” says George. “I wanted to go to the club. I detest Bayne, anyhow.”

“Yes, but he’s President of the Security Trust. If you want to get their new contract, you’d best dine, and get him to promise you. I’ve already lunched her, so the ground’s prepared.”

“Oh, very well,” growls George; “of course you’re right. I’ll be on hand.”

Result: They cement a friendship with two odious people whom they are afterward obliged to invite; but George gets the contract, and twenty thousand goes down to the family bank account. This spirit is by no means unknown in English and Continental life, but certainly it has its origin and prime exponents in America. No other people finds money sufficient exchange for perpetual boredom.

The European goes where he is amused, with friends who interest him. He dares. The American does not; having always to prove that he can afford to be in certain places, that he is of sufficient importance to be with certain people. America is full of ruinously expensive resorts that have sprung up in response to this craving for self-advertisement on the part of her “rising” sons and daughters. Squads of newspaper reporters go with them, and the nation is kept accurately informed to the minute as to what Mrs. Spender wore this morning at Palm Beach, Mrs. Haveall at Newport, Mrs. Dash at Hot Springs; also how many horses, motor cars, yachts and petty paraphernalia Charles Spender, Jimmy Haveall, and Henry Dash are carrying about. The credit of these men, together often with the credit of large business firms, depends on the show they can afford to make, and the jewels their wives wear.

But I believe that no man has a duller life than the rich man—or the moderately rich man of New York. He is generally the victim of dyspepsia—from too rich food taken in too great a hurry; he is always the victim of the office. Not even after he has retired, to spend the remainder of his days in dreary luxury between his clubs and Continental watering places, does the office habit cease to torment him. Once and forever, it has murdered the enjoyment of leisure and annihilated pleasure in peace.

Being naturally heavy-minded on all subjects except business, the American man with time on his hands is in a pitiable plight. I have met some of these poor gentlemen, wandering helplessly about the world with their major-general wives, and I must say they are among the most pathetic of married men. They hibernate in hotel lounges, smoking their enormous cigars and devouring their two-weeks-old New York newspapers; or, when they get the chance, monologuing by the hour on their past master strokes in the land where “things hum.” Sometimes in self-defence against the wife’s frocks and French hats, they have a hobby: ivories, or old silver—something eminently respectable. If so, they are apt to be laborious about it, as they are about all culture which they graft on themselves, or have grafted on them. Sometimes they turn their attention to sport; but the real sport of the American, man and woman, is climbing. It is born in them, and they never actually give it up until they die.

Meanwhile the couple who have resisted divorce and continued to climb together turn anxious eyes on the upward advance of their children. If the latter make a false step, mother with her trained wit must repair it; father must foot the bill. No more extravagantly indulgent parent exists than the American parent who himself has had to make his own way. His children are monarchs, weightedly crowned with luxuries they do not appreciate; and for them he slaves till death or nervous prostration lays him low. One wonders when the nation that has lost its head over the American girl will awake to the discovery of the American father. For the present he is a silent, deprecatory creature, toiling unceasingly six days of the week, and on the seventh to be found in some unfrequented corner of the house, inundated by newspapers, or unobtrusively building blocks in the nursery—where there is one.

As a rule, American children own the house, monopolize the conversation at meals, which almost invariably they take with their elders—whether there are guests or not, and are generally as arrogant and precocious little tyrants as unlimited indulgence and admiration can make them. They have been allowed to see and read everything their parents see and read; they have been taken to the theatre and about the world, from the time they could walk; they have, many of them, travelled abroad, and are ready to discuss Paris or London with the languid nonchalance of little old men and women; on the whole, these poor spoiled little people, through no fault of their own, are about as unpleasant and unnatural a type as can be found.

Instead of being kept simple and unsophisticated they are early inculcated with the importance of money and the things it can buy. American boys, rather than vying with one another in tennis or swimming vie with one another in the number of motor cars they own or sail-boats or saddle-horses, as the case may be. They would scorn the pony that is the English boy’s delight, but it is true that many young Americans at the tender age of twelve own their own motors, which they drive and discuss with the blasé air of men of the world. In like fashion the little girls, from the time they can toddle, are consumed with the idea of outdressing one another; and even give box parties and luncheons—beginning, almost before they are out of the cradle, to imitate their mothers in ambition and the consuming spirit of competition.

Naturally, one is speaking of the children of the wealthy, or at least well off; among the children of the working classes, whatever their grade of intelligence or education, we find the same sturdy independence and ability that characterizes their mothers and fathers. But all American children are sophisticated—one glance at a daily newspaper is enough to make them so; and they live in an atmosphere of worldly wisdom and knowledge of the sordid, which those of us who believe that childhood should be ingenuous and gay find rather sad. The little pitchers, in this case, have not only big ears but eyes and wits sharp to perceive the sorry things they would naturally learn soon enough.

They are allowed to wander, unshielded, among the perplexing mixed motives, the standards in disarray, of this theatre where life in its myriad relations is still in adjustment. Like small troubled gnomes seeking light, they flit across the hazardous stage; where their more experienced leaders have yet to extricate order out of a sea of sentimental hypocrisies, inflated ideals, and makeshift laws.

American men and women have been at great pains to construct “a world not better than the world it curtains, only foolisher.” They have obstinately refused to admit one another as they actually are—which, after all, is a remarkably fine race of beings; preferring the pretty flimsiness of a house of cards of their own making to the indestructible mansion of humanity. When their passion for inventing shall be converted into an equally ardent passion for reflecting—as it surely will be—they will see their mistake in a trice; and, from that time, they are destined to be not a collection of finely tuned nervous organisms, but a splendid race of thinking creatures.

II
THE CURTAIN RISES
(Paris)

I
ON THE GREAT ARTISTE

Out of the turmoil and struggling confusion of rehearsal, to gaze on the finished performance of the great artiste! For in Paris we are before the curtain, not behind it; and few foreigners, though they may adopt the city for their own, and lovingly study it for many years, are granted more than an occasional rare glimpse of its personality without the stage between. From that safe distance, Paris coquets with you, rails at you, laughs and weeps for you; but first she has handed you a programme, which informs you that she does the same for all the world, at a certain hour each day, and for a fixed price. And if ever in the ardour of your admiration you show signs of forgetting, of seeking her personal favour by a rash gesture or smile, she points you imperiously to the barricade of the footlights—or vanishes completely, in the haughtiness of her ire.

Therefore, the tourist will tell you, Paris is not satisfactory. Because to his greedy curiosity she does not open her soul as she does the gates of her art treasures and museums, he pronounces her shallow, mercenary, heartless, even wicked. As her frankness in some things is foreign to his hypocrisy, as her complex unmorality resists his facile analysis, he grasps what he can of her; and goes away annoyed. Really to know Paris is to offer in advance a store of tolerance for her inconsistencies, patience for her whims, and the sincere desire to learn finally to see behind her mask—not to snatch it rudely from her face.

But this cannot be done in the curt fortnight which generally limits the casual visitor’s acquaintance. Months and years must be spent, if true knowledge of the City of Light is to be won. We can only, in our brief survey of its more significant phases, indicate a guide to further study of a place and people well worth a wider scrutiny.

The most prejudiced will not deny that Paris is beautiful; or that there is about her streets and broad, tree-lined avenues a graciousness at once dignified and gay. Stand, as the ordinary tourist does on his first day, in the flowering square before the Louvre; in the foreground are the fountains and bright tulip-bordered paths of the Tuileries—here a glint of gold, there a soft flash of marble statuary, shining through the trees; in the centre the round lake where the children sail their boats. Beyond spreads the wide sweep of the Place de la Concorde, with its obelisk of terrible significance, its larger fountains throwing brilliant jets of spray; and then the trailing, upward vista of the Champs Elysées to the great triumphal Arch: yes, even to the most indifferent, Paris is beautiful.

To the subtler of appreciation, she is more than beautiful: she is impressive. For behind the studied elegance of architecture, the elaborate simplicity of gardens, the carefully lavish use of sculpture and delicate spray, is visible the imagination of a race of passionate creators—the imagination, throughout, of the great artist. One meets it at every turn and corner, down dim passageways, up steep hills, across bridges, along sinuous quays: the masterhand and its “infinite capacity for taking pains.” And so marvellously do its manifestations of many periods through many ages combine to enhance one another that one is convinced that the genius of Paris has been perennial; that St. Genevieve, her godmother, bestowed it as an immortal gift when the city was born.

From earliest days every man seems to have caught the spirit of the man who came before, and to have perpetuated it; by adding his own distinctive yet always harmonious contribution to the gradual development of the whole. One built a stately avenue; another erected a church at the end; a third added a garden on the other side of the church, and terraces leading up to it; a fourth and fifth cut streets that should give from the remaining two sides into other flowery squares with their fine edifices. And so from every viewpoint, and from every part of the entire city, today we have an unbroken series of vistas—each one different and more charming than the last.

History has lent its hand to the process, too; and romance—it is not an insipid chain of flowerbeds we have to follow, but the holy warriors of Saint Louis, the roistering braves of Henry the Great, the gallant Bourbons, the ill-starred Bonapartes. These as they passed have left their monuments; it may be only in a crumbling old chapel or ruined tower, but there they are: eloquent of days that are dead, of a spirit that lives forever staunch in the heart of the fervent French people.

It comes over one overwhelmingly sometimes, in the midst of the careless gaiety of the modern city: the old, ever-burning spirit of rebellion and savage strife that underlies it all; and that can spring to the surface now on certain memorable days, with a vehemence that is terrifying. Look across the Pont Alexandre, at the serene gold dome of the Invalides, surrounded by its sleepy barracks. Suddenly you are in the fires and awful slaughter of Napoleon’s wars. The flower of France is being pitilessly cut down for the lust of one man’s ambition; and when that is spent, and the wail of the widowed country pierces heaven with its desolation, a costly asylum is built for the handful of soldiers who are left—and the great Emperor has done his duty!

Or you are walking through the Cité, past the court of the Palais de Justice. You glance in, carelessly—memory rushes upon you—and the court flows with blood, “so that men waded through it, up to the knees!” In the tiny stone-walled room yonder, Marie Antoinette sits disdainfully composed before her keepers; though her face is white with the sounds she hears, as her friends and followers are led out to swell that hideous river of blood.

A pretty, artificial city, Paris; good for shopping, and naughty amusements, now and then. History? Oh yes, of course; but all that’s so dry and uninspiring, and besides it happened so long ago.

Did it? In your stroll along the Rue Royale, among the jewellers’ and milliners’ shops and Maxim’s, glance up at the Madeleine, down at the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. Little over a hundred years ago, this was the brief distance between life and death for those who one minute were dancing in the “Temple of Victory,” the next were laying their heads upon the block of the guillotine. Can you see, beyond the shadowy grey pillars of the Temple, that brilliant circling throng within? The reckless-laughing ballet girl in her shrine as “Goddess,” her worshippers treading their wild measures among the candles and crucifixes and holy images, as though they are pursued? Look—a grim presence is at the door. He enters, lays a heavy hand upon the shoulder of a young and beautiful dancer. She looks into his face, and smiles. The music never stops, but goes more madly on; as the one demanded makes a low révérence, then rising, throws a kiss over her shoulder to her comrades who in turn salute her; calls a gay “Adieu!” and with the smile still terrible upon her lips—is gone.

Ah, but the French are different now, you say. Those were the aristocrats, the vieille noblesse; these modern Republicans are of another breed. And yet the same blood flows in their veins, the same scornful courage animates them—who, for example, leads the world in aviation?—and on days like the fourteenth of July (the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille), the common people at least show a patriotism no less fiery if less ferocious than they showed in 1789. Let us see if they are so different after all.

The first charge against the French invariably is that of artificiality. Anglo-Saxons admit them to be charming, of a delightful wit and keen intelligence; but, they immediately add, how deep does it go? Superficially, the Parisian is vastly agreeable; courteous to the point of extravagance, an accomplished conversationalist, even now and then with a flash of the profound. Probe him, and what do you find? A cynical, world-weary degenerate, who will laugh at you when your back is turned, and make love to your wife before your very eyes!

AN OPEN-AIR BALL ON THE 14TH JULY

And why not? You should appreciate the compliment to your good taste. It is when he begins to make love behind one’s back that one must beware of one’s French friend; for he is a finished artist at the performance, and women know it, and are prepared in advance to be subdued. He is by no means a degenerate, however, the average Frenchman; he has to work too hard, and besides he has not the money degeneracy costs. He may have his “petite amie,” generally he has; but quite as generally she is a wholesome, well-behaved little person,—a dressmaker in a small way, or vendeuse in a shop—content to drink a bock with him in the evening, at their favourite café, and on Sundays to hang on his arm during their excursion to St. Germain or Meudon. Just as a very small percentage of New Yorkers are those who dwell in Wall Street and corner stocks, so a very small percentage of Parisians are those who feed louis to night restaurants and carouse till morning with riotous demi-mondaines.

It is a platitude that foreigners are the ones who support the immoral resorts of Paris; yet no foreigner seems to care to remember the platitude. The best way to convince oneself of it forever is to visit a series of these places, and take honest note of their personnel. The employés will be found to be French; but ninety-eight per cent. of the patrons are English, German, Italian, Spanish, and North and South American. The retort is made that nevertheless the Parisians started such establishments in the first place. They did; but only after the stranger had brought his crude sensuality to their variety theatres and night cafés, stripping the first of their racy wit, the second of their rollicking bonhomie, taking note only of the license underlying both—and blatantly revelling in it. Then it was that the ever-alert commercial sense of the Frenchman awoke to a new method of making money out of foreigners; and the vulgar night-restaurant of today had its beginning.

But not only in the matter of degeneracy is the common analysis of the Parisian open to refutation; his inveterate cynicism also comes up for doubt. The attitude that calls forth this mistaken conclusion on the part of those not well acquainted with French character is more or less the attitude of every instinctively dramatic nature: a kind of impersonal detachment, which causes the individual to appreciate situations and events first as bits of drama, seen in their relation to himself. Thus, during the recent scandal of the motor bandits, I have heard policemen laugh heartily at some clever trick of evasion on the part of the criminals; only to see them turn purple with rage the next minute, on realizing the insult to their own intelligence.

A better example is the story of the little midinette who, though starving, would not yield to her former patron (desirous also of being her lover), and whom the latter shot through the heart as she was hurrying along the Quai Passy late at night. “Quel phenomène!” she exclaimed, with a faint shrug, as her life ebbed away in the corner brasserie; “to be shot, while on the way to drown oneself—c’est inoui!” The next moment she was dead. And all she had to say was, “what a phenomenon—it’s unheard of!”

Is this cynicism? Or is it not rather the characteristic impersonality of the histrionic temper, which causes the artist, even in death, to gaze at herself and at the scene, as it were, from the critical vantage of the wings? And the light shrug—which so often grounds the idea of heartlessness, or simply of shallow frivolity, in the judgment of the stranger—look closer, and you will see it hiding a brave stoicism that this race of born actors makes every effort to conceal. The French throughout embody so complex a combination of Latin ardour, Spartan endurance, and Greek ideality as to render them extremely difficult of any but the most superficial comprehension. They laugh at things that make other people shudder; they take fire at things that leave other people cold; they burn with a white flame for beauties other people never see. As a great English writer has said, “below your level, they’re above it:—and a paradox is at home with them!”

But I do not think that they are always ridiculing the foreigner, when the latter is uncomfortably conscious of their smiling glance upon him. There are travelling types at whom everyone laughs, and these delight the Frenchman’s keen humour; but the ordinary stranger has become so commonplace to Paris that, unless he or she is especially distinguished, no one takes any notice. Here, however, we have in a nutshell the reason for that smile that sometimes irritates the foreigner: it is often a smile of pure admiration. The great artist’s eye knows no distinction of nationality or an iota of provincial prejudice. When it lights upon ugliness, it is disgusted—or amused, if the ugliness has a touch of the comic; when, on the other hand, it lights upon beauty—and how instant it is to spy out the most obscure trait of this—enthusiasm is kindled, regardless of kind or race, and the vif French features break into a smile of pleased appreciation. Here, he would say, is someone who contributes to the scene; someone who helps to make, not mar, the radiant ensemble we are striving for.

Paris, as no other city in the world, offers a playhouse of brilliant and charming mise-en-scène; and gives the visitor subtly to understand that she expects him to live up to it. Otherwise she has no interest in him. For the well-tailored Englishman, the striking Américaine, for anyone and everyone who can claim title to that supreme quality, chic, Paris is ready to open her arms and cry kinship. Those whom she favours, however, are held strictly to the mark of her fine standard of the exquisite; and if they falter—oblivion.

“I am never in Paris two hours,” said an American friend of mine, “before I begin to perk and prink, and furbish up everything I have. One feels that each man and woman in the street knows the very buttons of one’s gloves, and quality of one’s stockings; and that every detail of one’s costume must be right.” Many people have voiced the same impression: as of being consciously and constantly “on view”—before spectators keenly critical. The curtain seems to rise on oneself alone in the centre of the stage, and never to go down until the last pair of those appraising eyes has passed on.

It is a very different appraisement, however, from the “inventory stare” of Fifth Avenue. Here, not money value but beauty of line—blend of colour, grace, verve—is the criterion. And the modestly gowned little midinette receives as many admiring glances as the gorgeous demi-mondaine, if only she has contrived an original cut to her frock, or tied a clever, new kind of bow to her hat. Novelty, novelty, is the cry of the exacting artiste; and who obeys wins approval—who has exhausted imagination is laid upon the shelf.

But, again, this is not the shifting, impermanent temper of Madame New York; it is the fickle variability of the great artist, exercising her eternal prerogative: caprice. She accepts a fashion one week, discards it the next for one newer; throws that aside two days later, and demands to know where everyone’s ideas have gone. It is not that she is pettish, but simply that she is used to being slaved for, and to being pleased—by something different, something more charming every hour. Infinite pains are taken to produce the merest trifle she may fancy. Look from your window into the rows of windows up and down the street, or that line your court: everywhere people are sewing, fitting minute bits of delicate stuffs into a pattern, threading tiny pearls to make a border, straining their eyes in dark work-rooms,—toiling indefatigably—to create some fragile, lovely thing that will be snatched up, worn once or twice, and tossed aside, forgotten for the rest of time.

Yet no one of the workers seems to grow impatient or disheartened over this; the faces bent absorbedly over their tasks are bright with interest, alert and full of eagerness to make something that will captivate the difficult mistress, if only for an hour. They may never see her—when she comes to inspect their handiwork, they are shut behind a dingy door; at best, they may only catch a glimpse of her as she enters her carriage, or sweeps past them outside some brilliant theatre of her pleasure. But one cries to another: “She’s wearing my fichu!” The other cries back: “And I draped her skirt!” And supreme contentment illumines each face, for each has helped towards the goddess’s perfection—and they are satisfied.

As I heard one unimportant little couturière remark, “Dieu merci, in Paris we all are artists!” And so they all are responsible for the finished success of the star. One cannot help contrasting this ideal that animates the most insignificant of them—the ideal of sheer beauty, towards which they passionately toil to attain—with the stolid “what-do-I-get-out-of-it” attitude of the Anglo-Saxon artisan. French working people are poorly paid, they have little joy in life beyond the joy of what they create with their fingers; yet there is about them a fine contentment, an almost radiance, that is inspiring only to look upon. When they do have a few francs for pleasure, you will find them at the Français or the Odéon—the best to be had is their criterion; and when the theatres are out of their reach, on Sundays and holidays they crowd the galleries and museums, exchanging keenly intelligent comment as they scrutinize one masterpiece after another.

The culture of the nation, at least, is not artificial; but deep-rooted as no other race can claim: in the poorest ouvrier, no less than in the most polished gentleman, there exists the insatiable instinct for what is fine and worthy to be assimilated. And if the prejudiced concede this perhaps, but add that it remains an intellectual instinct always—an artistic instinct, while the heart of French people is callous and cold, one may suggest that there are two kinds of artists: those who give away their hearts in their art, and those who jealously hide theirs lest the vulgar tear it to pieces.

And the great artiste, however gracious she may be for us, however kind may be her smile, never lets us forget that we are before a curtain; which, though she may draw it aside and give us brief glimpses of her wonder, conceals some things too precious to be shown.

II
ON HER EVERYDAY PERFORMANCE

Sight-seeing in Paris must be like looking at the Venus of Milo on a roll of cinematograph films—an experience too harrowing to be remembered. I am sure it is the better part of discretion to forswear Baedeker, and without system just to “poke round.” Thus one catches the artists, in the multiform moods of their life, as ordinary beings; and stumbles across historic wonders enough into the bargain.

Really to take Paris unawares, one must get up in the morning before she does, and slip out into the street when the white-bloused baker’s boy and a sleepy cocher or two, with their drowsy, dawdling horses, are all the life to be seen. One walks along the empty boulevards, down the quiet Rue de la Paix, into the stately serenity of the Place Vendôme and on across the shining Seine into the grey, ancient stillness of the crooked Rue du Bac. And in this early morning calm, of solitary spaces and clear sunshine, fresh-sprinkled streets and gently fluttering trees, one meets with a new and altogether different Paris from the dazzling, exotic city one knows by day and at night.

Absent is the snort and reckless rush of motors, the insistent jangling of tram and horse’s bells, the rumble of carts and clip-clop of their Norman stallions’ feet; absent the hurrying, kaleidoscopic throngs who issue from the subway stations and fill the thoroughfares; absent even that familiar smell-of-the-city which in Paris is a fusion of gasoline, wet asphalt, and the faint fragrance of women’s sachet: this virgin morning peace is without odour save the odour of fresh leaves, without noise, without the bustle of moving people. The city stretches its broad arms North and South, East and West, like a serene woman in the embrace of tranquil dreams; and suggests a soft and beautiful repose.

But, while still you are drinking deep of it, she stirs—opens her eyes. A distant cry is heard: “E-e-eh, pommes de terre-eeeeh!” And then another: “Les petites fraises du bois! Les petites fraises!” And the cries come nearer, and there is the sound of steps and the creak of a hand-cart; and Paris rubs her eyes and wakes up—she must go out and buy potatoes!

The same fat, brown-faced woman with the same two dogs—one pulling the cart, one running fussily along-side—has sold potatoes in the same streets round the Place Vendôme, ever since I can remember. For years, her lingering vibrant cry has roused this part of Paris to the first sign of day. And while she is making change, and gossiping with the concierge, and the smaller dog is sniffing impatiently round her skirts, windows are opened, gratings groan up, at the corner some workmen call to one another—and the day is begun.

While the streets are still comparatively empty, let us follow the first abroad—the little midinette (shop-girl) and her mother—to mass. They will choose one of the old, unfashionable churches, like St. Roch or La Trinité; though on Sundays they go to the Madeleine to hear the music, and revel in splendid pomp and pageantry. France at heart is agnostic; a nation of fatalists, if anything. But the vivid French imagination is held in thrall by the colour and mystic ritual of the Catholic church: by the most perfect in ceremonial and detail of all religions. When the curtain rises on the full magnificence of gorgeous altar, golden-robed bishop and officiating priests; when, in accompaniment to the sonorous Aves, exquisite music peals forth, and the whole is blended, melted together by the soft light of candles, the subtle haze of incense: into French faces comes that ecstasy with which they greet the perfect in all its manifestations. They are dévotes of beauty in the religious as in every other scene.

But now our midinette and her maman enter a dusky unpretentious old church, where quietly they say their prayers and listen to the monotonous chanting of a single priest, reading matins in a little corner chapel. The two women cross themselves, and go out. In the Place, the younger one stops to spend twopence for a spray of muguet—that delicate flower (the lily-of-the-valley) that is the special property of the midinettes of Paris, and that they love. On their Saint Catherine’s Day (May 1st), no girl is without a little bunch of it as a “porte-bonheur” for her love affairs during the next year.

But the midinette calls, “au ’voir”; and the maman returns, “à ce soir!” And they disappear, the one to her shop, the other to her duties as concierge or storekeeper, and we are left in the Place alone. What about coffee? Let us take it here at the corner brasserie, where the old man with his napkin tucked in his chin is crumbling “crescents” and muttering imprecations at the government—which he attacks through the Matin or Figaro spread upon his knees. A young man, with melancholy black moustaches and orange boots, is the only other client at this early hour. He refuses to eat, though a café complet is before him; and looks at his watch, and sighs. We know what is the matter with him.

Considerate of the lady who is late, we choose a table on the other side—all are outdoors of course, in this Springtime of the year—and devote ourselves to discussing honey and rolls and the season’s styles in hosiery, which young persons strolling towards the boulevard benevolently offer for our inspection. Occasionally they pause, and graciously inquire if we “have need of someone?” And on our replying—with the proper mixture of apology and admiration—that all our wants seem to be attended to, pass on with a shrug of resignation.

Motor-buses are whirring by now, and a maze of fiacres, taxis, delivery-boy’s bicycles, and heavy trucks skid round the slippery corner in dangerous confusion. The traffic laws of Paris are of the vaguest, and policemen are few and far between; all at once, the Place seems unbearably thick and full of noise. We call for our addition, exchange complaisances with the waiter, and depart—just as the young man with the orange boots, with a cry of “enfin!” tucks the hand of a bewitchingly pretty young lady (doubtless a mannequin) within his arm, and starts towards the Rue de la Paix.

The Rue de la Paix at half past nine in the morning does not intrigue us. We prefer to wait for it until the sensational heure des rendez-vous, in the evening. Why not jump into a cab and bowl leisurely out to the Bois? It will be cool there, and quiet during the hour before the fashionable cavaliers come to ride. With a wary eye for a horse of reasonable solidity, we engage a blear-eyed Gaul to tow us to the Porte Dauphine. We like this Gaul above other Gauls, because his anxious flop-eared dog sitting next to him on the box gives every sign of liking him. And though, even before we have turned into the Champs Elysées, there have been three blood-curdling rows between cabby and various colleagues who presumed to occupy a place in the same street; though whips have been brandished and such ferocious epithets as “brother-in-law of a bantam!” “son of a pigeon-toed hen!” have been brandished without mercy by our remorseless Jehu, we take the reassuring word of his dog’s worshipping brown eyes that he is not a bad sort after all.

He cracks us out the Champs Elysées at a smart pace; yet we have time to gloat over the beauties of this loveliest of all avenues: its spacious gardens, its brilliant flower-plots, its quaint little guignols and donkey carriages for children. Vendors of jumping bunnies and squeaking pigs thread in and out the shady trees, showing their fascinating wares; and one does not wonder at the swarm of small people with their bright-ribboned nurses, who flock round to admire—and to buy.

This part of the avenue—from the Concorde to the Rond-Point—is given over to children; and all kinds of amusements, wise and unwise, are prepared for them. But by far the most popular are the guignols: those theatres-in-little, where Punch and Judy go through their harassing adventures, to the accompaniment of “c’est joli, ça!” and “tiens, que c’est chic!”; uttered by enthusiastic small French throats, seconded by applauding small French hands. For in Paris even the babies have their appreciation for the drama that is offered them before they can talk; and show it so spontaneously, yet emphatically, that one is arrested by their vehemence.

But we can take in these things only in passing, for Jehu and the flop-eared dog are carrying us on up the suavely mounting avenue, beyond the haughty portals of fashionable hotels and automobile houses de luxe; round the stately Arc de Triomphe, and into the Avenue du Bois. Here a sprinkling of governesses and their charges, old ladies, and lazy young men are ranged along in the stiff luxury of penny chairs. On a Sunday we might stop and take one ourselves, to watch the parade of toilettes and the lively Parisian jeunesse at its favourite game of “faire le flirt”; but this morning the terrace is half asleep, and above it the houses of American millionaires and famous ladies of the demi-monde turn forbidding closed shutters to our inquiring gaze. Jehu speeds us past them, and we alight at the Porte Dauphine, the principal entrance to the Bois.

Green grass, the glint of a lake, broad, sandy roads and intimate slim allées greet us, once within the gates; while all round and overhead are the slender, grey-green French poplars, fashioned into gracious avenues and seductive pathways, with its gay little restaurant at the end. Of all styles and architecture are these last: Swiss châlets, Chinese pagodas, Japanese tea-houses, and the typical French pavillon; they have one common trait, however—that of serving atrocious food at a fabulous price. Let us abjure them, and wander instead along the quite expansive lake, to the rocks and miniature falls of Les Rochers.

All through the Bois one is struck with the characteristic French passion for vistas. There is none of the natural wildness of Central Park, or the uninterrupted sweep of green fields that gives the charm of air and openness to the parks of London; but—though here in Paris we are in a “wood”—everywhere there is the elaborate simplicity of French landscape gardening: trees cut into tall Gothic arches, or bent into round, tunnel-like curves; brush trimmed precisely into formal box hedges; paths leading into avenues, that in turn lead into other avenues—so that before, behind, and on every side there is that prolonged silver-grey perspective. One sees the same thing at Versailles and St. Cloud: in every French forest, for that matter. The artist cannot stay her hand, even for the hand of nature.

And so, in the Bois, rocks have been built into grottos, and trickling waterfalls trained to form cascades above them; and little lakes and islands have been inserted—everything, anything, that the artistic imagination could conceive, to enhance the sylvan scene for the critical actors who frequent it. Which reminds us that these last will be on view now—it is eleven o’clock, their hour for riding and the promenade. So let us leave Les Rochers, and the greedy goats of the Pré Catalan, and hasten back to the Avenue des Acaçias and the famous Sentier de Vertu.

Here, a chic procession of élégantes and their admirers are strolling along, laughing and chatting as they come upon acquaintances, forming animated little groups, only to break up and wander on to join others. Cavaliers in smart English coats, or the dashing St. Cyr uniform, canter by; calling gay greeting to friends, for whose benefit they display an elaborately careless bit of clever horsemenship en passant. Ladies and “half-ladies” in habits of startling yet somehow alluring cut and hue—heliotrope and brick pink are among the favourites—allow their mounts to saunter lazily along the allées, while their own modestly veiled eyes spy out prey. They are viewed with severity by the bonne bourgeoise of the tortoise-shell lorgnettes and heavy moustache; who keeps her limousine within impressive calling distance, while she, with her fat poodle under her arm, waddles along ogling the beaux.

A doughty regiment of these there are: young men with marvellous waists and eager, searching eyes; middle-aged men with figures “well preserved,” and eyes that make a desperate effort at eagerness, but only succeed in looking tired; and then the old gallants, waxed and varnished, and gorgeously immaculate, from sandy toupée to gleaming pointed shoes—the three hours they have spent with the barber and in the scrupulous hands of their valet have not been in vain. They do the honours of the Sentier, with a courtliness that brings back Louis Quatorze and the days of Ninon and the lovely Montespan.

But there are as lovely—and perhaps as naughty?—ladies among these who saunter leisurely down the grey-green paths today. In wonderfully simple, wonderfully complicated toilettes de matin, they stroll along in pairs—or again (with an oblique glance over the shoulder, oh a quite indifferent glance), carelessly alone with two or three little dogs. I read last week in one of the French illustrated papers a serious treatise on ladies’ dogs. It was divided into the three categories: “Dogs for morning,” “Dogs for afternoon,” “Dogs of ceremony”—meaning full-dress dogs. And the article gravely discussed the correct canine accessory that should be worn with each separate costume of the élégante’s elaborate day. It omitted to add, however, the incidental value of these costly scraps of fuzz, as chaperones. But with a couple of dogs, as one pretty lady softly assured me, one can go anywhere, feeling quite secure; and one’s husband, too—for of course he realizes that the sweet little beasts must be exercised!

So the conscientious ladies regularly “exercise” them; and if sometimes, in their exuberance, Toto and Mimi escape their distressed young mistresses, and must be brought back by a friend who “chanced” to be near at hand—who can cavil? And if the kind restorer walks a little way with the trio he has reunited, or sits with them for a few moments under the trees, why not? They are always three—Toto and Mimi and the lady—and one’s friends who may happen to pass know for themselves how hard dogs are to keep in hand!

So we have a series of gay, well-dressed couples wandering down the intimate allées, or scattered in the white iron chairs within the trees: a very different series from those who will be here at eleven o’clock tonight—and every night. The Bois is far too large to be policed, and the grotesque shapes that haunt it after dark—crouching, low-browed figures that slink along in the shadows, greedy for any sort of prey—make one shudder, even from the security of a closed cab. All about are the brilliant, bright-lit restaurants with their crowds of feasting sybarites; yet at the very door of these—waiting to fall upon them if they take six steps beyond the threshold—is that grisly, desperate band, some say of Apaches, others say monsters worse than those.

At all events, it is better in the evening to turn one’s eyes away from the shadowy paths, and towards the amusing tableaux to be seen in passing fiacres and taxis. To the more reserved Anglo-Saxon, French frankness of demonstration in affairs of the affections comes always as a bit of a shock. To see a lady reclining against the arm of a gentleman, as the two spin along the boulevard in an open horse-cab; to watch them, quite oblivious of the world looking on, ardently turn and kiss one another: this is a disturbing and meanly provocative scene to put before the susceptible American. No one else pays any attention to it—they have acted that scene so many times themselves; and when, in the friendly darkness of the Bois at night, all lingering discretion is thrown to the winds, and behind the cabby’s broad, habituated back anything and everything in the way of fervid love-making goes on—who cares? Except to smile sympathetically, and return to his own affair, more ardently than ever. The silhouettes one sees against taxi-windows and the dust-coloured cushions of fiacres are utterly demoralizing to respectable American virtue.

Let us turn on the light of day, therefore, and in a spasm of prudence mount a penny-bus that traffics between the Étoile and the Latin Quarter. It is a flagrant faux-pas to arrive in the Latin Quarter by way of anything more sumptuous than a penny-bus or a twopenny tram. It shrieks it from the cobbles, that one is a “nouveau”; and that, in the Quarter, is a disgrace too horrible to be endured.

We rock across the Pont Royal, then, on the precarious upper story of an omnibus; and wind along the narrow Rue du Bac, which, since our visit of early morning, has waked to fitful life in its old plaster and print shops. Second-hand dealers of all kinds flourish here, and the medley of ancient books, musty reliquaries, antique jewelry, and battered images minus such trifles as a nose or ear, makes the street into one continuous curiosity-shop. Until one reaches the varnish and modern bustle of the Bon Marché stores; then, when we have been shot through the weather-beaten slit of the Rue des Saints Pères, I insist that we shall climb down and go on foot up quaint, irregular Notre-Dame-des-Champs to the garden where I spent many joyous days as a student.

It is in a crooked little street which runs breathlessly for a block between Notre-Dame-des-Champs and the Boulevard Montparnasse—and there stops; leaving you with the insinuation that it has done its best to squeeze in on this frazzled boundary of the old Quarter, and that more cannot be expected of it. On one side of the abrupt block, rambles the one-time hôtel of the Duchesse de Chevreuse; intrigante, cosmopolitan, irresponsible lover of adventure, who kept Louis XIII’s court in a hubbub with her pranks and her inordinate influence over Queen Anne.

The grey court that has seen the trysts of Chalais, Louvigni, even of the great Richelieu himself, rests still intact; and they say the traditional secret passage also—leading from a hidden recess in the garden to the grands palais. But that is only legend (which, by some vagary, still clings to the feelers of the practical twentieth century mind), and I have never seen it. The hôtel is now covered yearly with a neat coat of yellow paint, and used as an apartment house; crowded by the usual rows of little Quarter shops: a cobbler’s, a blanchissage, a goldsmith’s on the East wing; the beaten-down door of an antiquary on the West: until its outraged painted bricks seem to bulge out over the thread of a side-walk, in continual effort to rub noses with the hôpital opposite—the only other house of any age in the street.

One peep at the garden—and you will admit it is worth it, with its lovely plaintive iris, its pale wistaria, its foolish pattering fountain—and we turn towards the Boulevard and lunch. I have said this bit of a street along which we are walking is on the boundary of the old Quarter. Alas, in these days there is no Quarter. One tries to think there is, particularly if one is a new-comer to the Left Bank, and enthusiastic; but one learns all too soon that there is not. There are students, yes, and artists; and the cafés and paintshops and pretty grisettes that go with students and artists. But the quarter of Rudolph and Mimi, of Trilby and Svengali: can you find it in steam-heated apartments, where ladies in Worth gowns pour tea? Or in the thick blue haze about the bridge and poker games at the Café du Dôme?

The Quarter has passed; there remains only its name. And that we should use with a muttered “forgive us our trespasses”; for it is the name of romance, shifted onto commonplaceness.

Yet one can still enjoy there the romance of a delicious meal for two francs fifty; and there are any number of jealously hidden places from which to choose. Let us go to Henriette’s, this tiny hole-in-the-wall, where one passes the fragrant-steaming kitchen on the way to the little room inside, and calls a greeting to the cook—an old friend—where he stands, lobster-pink and beaming, over his copper sauce-pans. Back under a patched and hoary skylight the tables are placed; and a family of mild-mannered mice clamber out over the glass to peer inquiringly at the gluttons below—who eat at one bite enough cheese to keep any decently delicate mouse for a week.

We order an omelette aux champignons, a Chateaubriand (corresponding to our tenderloin of steak) with pommes soufflés; as a separate vegetable, petits pois à la Française, and for dessert a heaping plate of wild strawberries to be eaten with one of these delectable brown pots of thick crême d’Isigny—aih! It makes one exquisitely languid only to think of it, all that luscious food! We lean back voluptuously in our stiff little chairs, and gaze about us while waiting for it.

At the half dozen tables round us are seated the modern prototypes of Rudolph and Mimi: mildly boisterous American youths from the Beaux Arts and Julien’s; careworn English spinsters with freckles and paint-smudged fingers; a Russian couple, with curious “shocked” hair and vivid, roving black eyes; a stray Frenchman or two, probably shop-keepers from the Boulevard, and a trio of models—red-lipped, torrid-eyed, sinuously round, in their sheath-fitting tailored skirts and cheap blouses. They are making a nonchalant meal off bread and cheese, and a bottle of vin ordinaire: evidently times are bad, or “ce bon garçon Harry’s” remittance has not come.

Proof of other bad times is in the charming frieze painted, in commemoration of the Queen of Hearts, by two girl artists of a former day, who worked out their over-due bill to the house in this decorative fashion. For the poverty, at least, of the traditional Quarter survives; though smothered into side streets and obscure “passages” by the self-styled “Bohemians” of Boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse. And one notices that the habitués of Henriette’s and of all the humbler restaurants have their own napkin-rings which they take from the rack as they come in; does it not save them ten centimes, an entire penny, on the charge for couvert?

They have their own tobacco too, and roll their cigarettes with care not to spill a single leaf at the process; and you feel a heartless Dives to sit smoking your fragrant Egyptians after your luxurious meal and sipping golden Bénédictine at the considerable price of forty centimes (eight cents). Our more frugal neighbours, however, show no sign of envy, or indeed of interest of any sort; their careless indifference not only to us, but to their own meal and the desultory chatter of their comrades, speaks of long and familiar experience with both. Somehow they are depressing, these Rudolphs without their velveteens, these Mimis without their flowers and other romantic trappings of poverty; the hideous modern garments of the shabbily genteel only emphasize a sordid lack of petty cash.

I suggest that we run away from them, and hie us to the lilac-bushes and bewitching bébés of the Jardin du Luxembourg; for in the realm of the great artiste even the babies contribute to the scene, and in their fascinating short frocks, and wee rose-trimmed bonnets, are a gladsome troupe of Lilliputians with whom to while away one’s melancholy. But you may have an inhuman apathy towards babies, and prefer to taxi out to St. Germain for a view of the terrace, and a glimpse en route of sadly lovely Malmaison—the memory-haunted home of Josephine. Or you may suggest the races—though I hope you won’t, because in France the sport is secondary; and mannequins are a dull race. I had rather you chose an excursion up the Seine, on one of the fussy little river-boats; though of course at St. Cloud we should be sure to find a blaring street fair in possession of the forest, and at Meudon the same: the actors must bring their booths and flying pigs into the very domain of Dame Nature herself; being no respecters of congruity where passion for the theatric is concerned.

But we should have the cool vistas of the inner forest, and the stately satisfaction of historic stone stairs and mellow creamy-grey urns and statues through the trees; or we can go down the river instead to old Vincennes, and have a look at the grim prison-castle that has sheltered many a noble in disgrace. Which shall it be? To use Madame La France’s borrowed Spanish expression: I am “tout à votre disposition.”

III
AND ITS SEQUEL

Whichever it is, we must be back in time for tea at one of the fashionable “fiv’ o’clocks”; for, though many ladies who buy their clothes in Paris do not know it, looking at grandes dames is vastly different from looking at mannequins or the demi-monde; and the French grande dame is at her best at the tea hour. Someone has said, with truth, that the American woman is the best-dressed in the morning, the Englishwoman the best-dressed at night; but that the Parisienne triumphs over both in the gracious, clinging gown of afternoon.

Let us turn into this exclusive little establishment in the Place Vendôme, and from the vantage of a window-table in the mezzanine observe the lovely ladies as they enter. The first to come is in the simplest frock of leaf-green—the average American woman would declare it “positively plain”; there is not a sign of lace or hand embroidery about it, only at the open throat a soft fall of finest net, snowy as few American women would take pains to have it. And the lady’s hair is warm copper, and her hat a mere ingenious twist of leaf-green tulle; but a master hand has draped it and the simple frock of green; and the whole is a beautiful blend of line and colour, as unstudied as a bit of autumn woodland.

Here is a combination more striking. The lady just stepping from the pansy limousine has chosen yellow for her costume of shimmering crêpe; a rich dull ochre, with a hint of red in its flowing folds. At the neck and wrists are bits of fragile old embroidery, yellow too with age, and that melt into the flesh-tones of the wearer till they seem part of her living self; while at the slim waist-line is a narrow band of dusky rose—the kind of rose that looks faintly coated with silver—and daringly caught up high at the right side, a single mauve petunia. The hat of course is black—a mere nothing of a tiny toque, with one spray of filmy feather low against the lady’s blond hair.

“But she is not pretty at all,” you realize suddenly; “she’s really almost ugly, and yet—”

Exactly. A Frenchwoman can be as ugly as it pleases perverse Heaven to make her; there is always the “and yet” of her overwhelming charm. You may call it artificial if you like—the mere material allurements of stuffs and bits of thread; but to arrange those stuffs there must be a fine discrimination, to know how to use those bits of thread, a subtle science no other woman has—or ever quite acquires. Look about you in the tea-room—now fast filling with women of all ages and all tastes—what is it that forms their great general attraction? White hands, shown to perfection by a fall of delicate lace, or the gleam of a single big emerald or sapphire; hands moving daintily among fragile china, the sheen of silver, the transparency of glass. And above the hands, vif faces, set in the soft coquetry of snowy ruches, graceful fichus, piquant Medici collars, but all open upon the alluring V of creamy throat.

What is it these women have? You can set down what they have on, but what is it you cannot set down, yet that you know they possess? It is the art of supreme femininity, carried out in the emphasis of every charm femininity has; by means of contrast, colour, above all by the subtlest means in everything: simplicity. And there is added to their conscious art a pervading delicate voluptuousness, that underlies the every expression of themselves as women; and that completes the havoc of the male they subjugate.

Look at him now. Do you know any man but an Englishman who likes tea? Yet here they are, these absinthe-ridden Frenchmen drinking it with a fervour; but their eyes are not within their cups! For again the highly proper little dogs are present—“dogs for the afternoon,” of course; and the management has been thoughtful in providing discreet corners and deep window-seats, where a tête-a-tête may be enjoyed without too many interruptions on the part of the chic waitress with a windward eye to tips.

Another precaution these abandoned couples take is a third person—usually a young girl—to be with them. Madame starts out with the young girl, by chance they meet Monsieur X at the five-o’clock, and have tea with him; of course he escorts the ladies home, and equally of course the young girl is “dropped” first. If between her house and that of Madame’s, the better part of an hour is employed in threading the tangled traffic of that time of evening, who can say a word except the chauffeur—who is given no reason to regret his long-suffering silence on such subjects. Thus during the hour after tea, the hour between six and seven, when kindly dusk lends her cloak to the game, husbands and wives play at their eternal trick of outwitting one another.

It may be a game that disgusts you, you may find it sordid, even repellent, to watch; but, among people with whom the marriage of convenience is universal (and in most respects turns out excellently well), what can you expect? A lover or a divorce, for both parties; and the French man and woman prefer to maintain the stability of house and name, and to wink at one another’s individual peccadilloes. They are generally very good friends, and devoted to their children; and never, never do they commit that crassness of the Anglo-Saxon, in bringing their amours within the home.

L’HEURE DU RENDEZ-VOUS. RUE DE LA PAIX

So let us watch the departing couples whirl away from the little tea-room, without too great severity; and ourselves wander out into the Place, and up the short, spectacular Rue de la Paix. This above all others is the hour to see it—when fashion throngs the narrow pavements, or bowls slowly past in open motor cars; and when the courts of the great dressmaker’s shops are filled with young blades, waiting for the mannequins to come down. One by one these marvellously slim, marvellously apparelled young persons appear; each choosing the most effective moment she can contrive for her particular entrance into the twilight of the street. A silken hum of skirts precedes her; the swains in the doorway eagerly look up—adjust their scarf-pins, give a jauntier tilt to their top-hats—and the apparition, sweetly smiling and emphatically perfumed, is among them.

There are murmured greetings, a suggestion from two of the bolder of the beaux, a gracious assent from the lady; and the three spin away in a taxi, to Armenonville or Château Madrid, for dinner. They have a very pleasant life, these mannequins; for lending the figure the bon Dieu gave them—or that they painstakingly have acquired—they receive excellent salaries from the great couturiers. In consideration of which they appear at the establishment when they please, or not at all, when they have the caprice to stay away. If the figure is sufficiently remarkable, there is no limit to the whims they can enjoy—and be pardoned, even eagerly implored to return to their deserted posts. And then, as we see, after professional hours—what pleasaunce of opportunity! What boundless possibilities of la vie chic! Really, saith the ex-midinette complacently, it is good to have become a mannequin.

Some there are who at this excellent business-hour of evening, make a preoccupied exit; sweep past the disappointed gentlemen in waiting, and walk swiftly towards the maze and glitter of the Boulevard. The gentlemen shrug, comprehending. A rendez-vous. Out of idle curiosity, one of them may follow. “Mais, ma chère!” he murmurs reproachfully, at sight of the ill-restored antiquity the lady annexes at the corner.

She makes a deprecatory little face, over her shoulder, which says, “You ought to understand, one must be practical. But what about tomorrow night?” And a bit of paste-board flutters from her gold purse and at the feet of the reproachful gentleman; who smiles, picks it up, reads it, shrugs, and strolls back to his doorway, to find other extravagance for this evening.

What a Paris! you exclaim; is there anything in it besides the rendez-vous? Not at this hour. For mechanics and midinettes, bank-clerks and vendeuses, shop-keepers and ever-thrifty daughters of joy, pour into the boulevards in a human flood; and always, following Biblical example, they go two by two. In another hour they will be before their croute-au-pot, in one of these omnipresent cafés; for the present they anxiously wait on corners, or, with a relieved smile, link arms and move off at an absorbed, lingering gait down the boulevard.

Some halt, to sit down at the little tables on the side-walk, and drink an apéritif. Here too, the old dogs of commerce and industry get together over a Pernod or a Dubonnet, and in groups of twos and threes heatedly thrash out the unheard-of fluctuations of the Bourse today. The bon bourgeois meets his wife, and hears of the children’s cleverness, the servant’s perfidy, over a sirop; two anæmic young government clerks gulp Amer Picon, and violently contradict one another about the situation in Morocco; a well-known danseuse sips vermouth with the long-haired youth who directs the orchestra at the Folies Bergères: it is as though, between six and seven, all Paris is strung along outside the cafés that link the boulevard into a chain of chairs and tables. And in the street, down the middle, motor-buses honk their horns, horse-buses crack their whips, cochers and chauffeurs shout anathema to one another and malediction on policemen and the human worm in general; while the traffic thickens and crawls slower with every minute, and a few helpless gendarmes struggle in vain to preserve order.

Let us out of it all, and to dine. We can go to Château Madrid, and eat under the trees, and watch the gorgeous Parisiennes in the gallery as instinctively they group themselves to lend heightened effect to the ensemble; or we can go to Paillard’s and pay ten dollars apiece for the privilege of sitting against the wall and consuming such sauces as never were in Olympus or the earth beneath; or we can dine above the gardens of the Ambassadeurs, in the elegant little balcony that overhangs a miniature stage, and later look on at the revue. Or we can sail up the river in the balmy gloaming, and eat a friture of smelts on the terrasse of the Pêche Miraculeuse—there are a score of places where we can find a delicious meal, and in each observe a different world; running from do to do in the scale of the race.

I suggest, however, that we choose a café in the Quarter—not one of the tiny eating-houses like Henriette’s where we lunched, but a full-fledged, prosperous café; frequented by the better-off artists and the upper-class Quarter grisettes. Ten minutes in the Underground lands us at the door of one of the best-known of these places. In the front room, with big windows open to the street, is the café des consommateurs; in the rear, the restaurant and card rooms, and a delightful galleried garden, where also one may dine. Alluring strains of Hoffmann’s Barcarolle entice us thither with all speed; and soon our enthusiasm is divided between chilled slices of golden melon and the caressing sensuousness of the maître d’orchestre’s violin.

In passing, one may note that good music in Paris is a rare quantity. Though many people come to study singing, there are few vocal concerts, and the Touche and the Rouge are the only orchestras of any importance. They give weekly concerts in small halls, hardly bigger than an ordinary-sized room, and the handful of attendants smoke their fat porcelain pipes and extract cherries out of glasses of kirsch, and happily imagine themselves music-lovers. But the great artiste is an artist through sight rather than through sound; and even in opera, where the dramatic element is or should be subservient to the music, the superdramatic French are ill-at-ease and hampered. Some of the performances at the Opéra Comique are delightful, for here the lighter pieces of Massenet and Debussy are given, with the French lilt and dash peculiar to these masters. But, at the Opéra itself, the Wagnerian compositions are poorly conducted, the audience uninterested and uninteresting; and even the beautiful foyer—which, since the famous New Year’s Eve balls have been done away with, knows no longer its former splendours—cannot compensate for the thoroughly dull evening one endures there.

Far happier is one listening to the serenades and intermezzos of the cherubic Alsatian violinist at the Quarter café-restaurant. And, after dinner, he plays solos out in the café proper, for the same absorbed polyglot audience that has listened to him for years. Let us range ourselves in this corner against the wall, between the two American lady artists of masculine tailoring and Kansas voices, and the fierce-mustachioed Czek, mildly amused over a copy of the Rire. Every seat in the big double room is taken now, and we are a varied crew of French bourgeois, Russian, Norwegian, and German students, English and American tourists, Japanese attachés (or so one supposes from their conversation, in excellent French, with our neighbour Czek), and blond and black bearded artists who might be of any nation except the Oriental.

They all know each other, and are exchanging jokes and cigarettes over their café crême—which they drink, by the way, out of glass tumblers—and paying goodnaturedly for a bock for Suzanne or Madeleine, whose bocks some other person should be paying. The room has taken on the look of a big family party, some talking, some writing letters, others reading from the shiny black-covered comic papers; all smoking, and sipping absently now and then from their steaming glasses or little verres de liqueur. The music drifts in soothingly, between spurts of conversation, and one is conscious of utter contentment and well-being.

Suddenly a door is flung open. In whirls a small hurricane, confined within a royal purple coat and skirt; gives one lightning glance round the circle of surprised merry-makers, and with a triumphant cry pounces on Suzanne yonder, with the fury of a young virago. “So!” pants the vixen, shaking poor Suzanne. “So you thought to outwit me, you thought to oust me, did you? Me, whom he knew six months before ever he saw you—me whom he took to Havre, to Fontainebleau, to—to—traitress! Coward! Scélérate! Take that—and that—and that!”

She slaps Suzanne soundly on both cheeks; Suzanne pulls her hat off—each makes a lunge at the other’s hair. “Mesdames, mesdames,” cries the patron, hurrying forward. “Je vous en prie—and monsieur,” reproachfully, “can you do nothing?”

Monsieur—the monsieur who kindly, and quite disinterestedly, paid Suzanne’s book—sits by, lazily tapping his fingers against the glass. “What would you?” he says, with a shrug. “Women—” another shrug—“one had as well let them finish it.”

But the patron is by no means of this mind. He begins telling those ladies that his house is a serious house; that his clients are of the most serious, that he himself absolutely demands and insists upon seriousness; and that if these ladies cannot tranquillize themselves instantly——

But of a sudden he halts—pulled up short by the abrupt halt of the ladies themselves. In the thick of the fray Suzanne has flung contemptuous explanation; Gaby, the virago, has caught it. A truce is declared. Curt conversation takes place. Monsieur, still lazily tapping, consents to confirm the defendant’s statement as fact. Gaby, though still suspicious, consents to restore the hated rival’s hat; and in ten minutes the three are tranquilly discussing Cubism and a new round of demi-brunes. The audience, who have gazed on the entire comedy with keen but quite impartial interest, shrug their shoulders, light fresh cigarettes, and return to their papers and pens. Since the first start of surprise, there has not been a murmur among them; only complete concentration on the drama, which the next minute they as completely forget.

There are a dozen such scenes a day, in one’s wandering about Paris; that is, a dozen scenes as sudden, as intense, and as quickly over. The everyday life of the people is so vivid, of such swift and varied contrast, that the theatre itself, to satisfy them, must overreach into melodrama before it rouses. I believe that no other city in the world, unless it be the next most dramatic, New York, could support a theatre like the Grand Guignol for example. I have seen there, in one evening, gruesomely realistic representations of a plague scene in India; the destruction of a submarine, with all the crew on board; and the operating-room of a hospital, where a woman is unnecessarily murdered to pay the surgeon’s wife’s hat bill.