Alexander Black

“ All the new notes and the new titles, and the new words are but an obbligato, an ornament to the love-motive glowing like a golden strain in the majestic symphony of life—the recurring melody always new, always old; always a surprise, always as certain as spring; so conquering in its power that Miss America, with all of her self-reliance, with all of her assumed superiority to wizard wiles and incantations, falls under the spell and has no regret. She is as willing as ever she was to sit at the feet of the right man. She knows her woman’s power. ”

“ It is ultimate romance, and I think I like it much better than the ultimate in realism. I like the heroine to be pretty. Unless the author specifically denies it, I always believe that she is pretty. You see I am hopelessly old-fashioned; and you are hopelessly modern. Probably you don’t care at all how the story comes out.”
“Oh, I am not so modern as that! I do care. What I like about realism is that you aren’t so sure how it will turn out. Doesn’t it always seem [72] to you like a waste of time to make them all so miserable when they are to live happily ever after anyway?” ”

“ Society is built upon individual sacrifice. Friendship lives by concession, and the intimacy of marriage carries to the extreme point the idea of inter-personal compromise, the recognition of the personality of another. To expect two people to lose, without effort, by the mere fact of marriage, the individuality which they had before the compact, is as absurd as it would be to take two clocks and tie them together with a piece of pink string and expect them instantly to begin keeping absolutely the same time. ”

“ The Hazenfield engines were hard at work. The ground trembled with the thump, thump, thump of the steam pumps, the black figures of the firemen scurried this way and that with many confused shouts, while the inky line of the hose twisted its way to the wing door of the factory.
It was at the wing door that some men were carrying out certain heavy cans which they placed at some distance from the burning building. These men were dripping with the hose water, the light of the flames glittering on their clothes and faces.
“Why don’t they pour the water through the windows?” cried Edith. ”

“ However, our national past and our national present are so full of superficial and even of fundamental contrasts, that if ever a merciful sentence is to be passed upon one who, peering through the “turbid media” of sociological analysis, mistakes the Zeitgeist for a new woman, it is in our own longitudes. Like a child growing up under the eye of an arrogant and pompous parent, we have, nationally, been made to feel from the beginning that we are new, even tentative, that we are unclassified, all but vagrant in the ethnological sense. ”

“ She only reflects the spirit of the age. The other day, in a moment of curiosity, I ran into one of those highly moral restaurants that have Biblical texts on the walls, and there, under the gorgeously lettered beatitude, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ was the brutal admonition in plain black and white, ‘Keep your eye on your hat.’ Under the sign, ‘Blessed is the matchmaker,’ a man should be able to read, ‘Keep your eye on your head.’ The world knows its business, and I suppose it is a better world than it ever was before. ”

“ The whip cracked and soon came the louder crack of a rifle, then a clatter of shots, and the two men in the coach, each with a rifle, began blazing away through the window at the yelling band of Indians in pursuit. It was all so real, the Indians looked so ferocious, the smoke and flame from the rifles was so thrilling and threatening, that Allan and McConnell found themselves shrinking in expectation of actual bullets. ”

“ I feel it in my bones that in spite of a gleam of intelligent interrogation as to the wisdom of pampering the American girl, I am going to keep right on—”
“You mean, if you will be honest,” blurted the Professor, “that you will keep on letting her alone as you do the boy child. That is all. Own up. The most that you have done is cease the special repression of the girl. For better or for worse the American has done simply that: forget sex in rearing his young.”
“Ah, Professor! when we forget sex are we not in danger of a costly transgression? Are we not combating nature?” ”

“ The traditional attitude of a woman is sentimental. The whole structure of a man’s scheme is based upon that assumption. Man doesn’t like to see woman without awe. He doesn’t like to see her belittle the tragedy of life or to hear her say in the presence of comedy, as Stevenson said of his ‘Prince Otto,’ that ‘none of it is exactly funny, but some of it is smiling.’ Yet in spite of your prejudices, I am much afraid that the American girl is a realist. If she consents to glance at romance it must be romance leavened by satire. ”

“ Ever since I saw those rooms in your coach-house, I have been thinking that it would be a fine idea for us to have them for a club—a camera club, if your father would let us have them. Now, if you really think you couldn’t be happy with all that money, why not take some of it and spend it fixing up the rooms and getting things for a club?”
“Splendid!” cried Allan. “It wouldn’t seem so good as giving to you, Owen; but it would be great to have a club, and we could all have the use of better materials than we could afford to have on our own account.” ”

“ I like to see a man get the right woman. But it is a wearing thing to try to direct the course of sentimental lightning. My feeling would be that in order to be a successful chaperon,—that is, to please the guardian, the girl, the man, and yourself,—you should undertake to regulate the social rather than the moral proprieties. I should go on believing, unless you were to contradict me, that it is not so much the business of a chaperon to see whom a girl meets and marries as to see how she meets and marries. ”

“ And yet the Professor wears a hat. I had occasion, one day, when she had left it for a moment on a table, to study it analytically as a creation. It was a fearful and wonderful thing. No man ever can forget the moment when first, with mature deliberation, and in a consciousness of the vast significance of life, he takes up a woman’s hat, timorously, as if it were a ten-inch shell or Minerva’s helmet, and gazes into its fragile fastness. When I mentally grasped, as a man may in the absence of the wearer, the many and extraordinary elements of the Professor’s hat ”

“ But Tranton went on:—
“Can’t you see,” he pursued, playfully knocking the pipe against the desk as if it were my head, “can’t you see the interest of intermittent associations in which all themes are relatively new and are never quite exhausted? What is it that makes marriage so stupid except to the accidentally right pair?—the certainty that the two who have become one will get talked out. It must be like talking to one’s self. In society it is different. You can’t get talked out. You can hardly get started, and a person must be a tremendous bore to give himself away with so small a chance. ”

“ We can understand that there is a merely relative difference of attitude between the savage lover who woos his lady with a club, and the modern suitor who swears to give up all of his clubs for her sake. What perplexes us is our anxiety to explain our modern instinct, and (what is more perplexing) our anxiety to explain her; to ascertain and even to catalogue her essential traits—to discover, if not why we prefer the American girl, at least what manner of girl it is that we thus are instinctively preferring. ”

“ It takes talent to reject a man gracefully; genius gracefully to accept him. Many a woman loses her last chance of supremacy, if she does not imperil [180] her equality, in the manner of her acceptance. I have heard a woman say that she never forgave her husband the artistic order and self-possession of his proposal. The brutality of such a thing lies in the fact that she cannot effectively do the same thing, though he might deserve it. Deny her surprise or confusion or some assumption of unpreparedness and you deny her a sophistry which sentiment seems by no means ready to give up. ”

“ It is hard to live down a tradition. Take the tradition about the college girl, for example, the tradition that she is a sombre person, strenuous, unlovely, dominated by an ambition to subdue man and emancipate her sex by sheer force of learning. You can call up a picture of her at work, her brain throbbing with great thoughts, her face seared by study, greeting you with a smileless challenge to talk to the point, mostly in Latin, and with a decent frequency in quotations from Plato and Epictetus. ”

“ WITH A BRIDE
They were playing the ballet music from “Sylvia” in the loggia, a levity which no one resented, not even the old gentleman with the pale daughter, and the unctuous wheeze of the clarionette floated through the palms of the court where the fountain was flinging diamonds into the sunlight of a Southern February. The Spanish banners flapped lazily at the gate. No one resented them either, for it was a good six months since we had been at war with Spain. Moreover, St. Augustine never had been at war with Spain. ”

“ Does any one deny that climate and history have made the Kentucky girl a being apart—that the Kentucky horses which she has ridden with so much spirit have had their effect in her whole style and personality? Could we fail to look for a distinctive flowering in the verdant slopes beyond the Sierras or amid that intensely American human environment on the plains of Texas? ”

“ When she gets fat she gets frightened, diets, and gets fatter. Then she gets a little angry, golfs, rides, swims, hustles, finds the secret, gets reasonably proper again and acquires the new charm that comes with the aroused energy and the humility of a threatened loss—or gain, as you may wish to put it. Nothing is more qualifying than the threatened adversity of fat. We all know women who would be simply insufferable if they were not a shade plumper than they care to be. ”

“ This independence has not merely accentuated the elusiveness which belongs to her as a woman. The quality of being hard to get is not new in woman, or in any degree original in any race. Ranging from the conditions in which barbaric woman is knocked down by the strongest bidder, to those in which she is knocked down to the highest, there is a uniform, because instinctive, outward habit of indifference or aloofness in the sex. But Miss America’s independence affects the whole question of her choice and the method of her choice. ”

“ The uncertainty breeds cynicism. Of course I know that there is something piquing about the mystery surrounding the motives of the unmarried, especially the motives of the unmarried woman. But although this is so entertaining in itself, although the new old maid is the most cheerful, the most useful, and the most fascinating sphinx of the century, I feel at times as if there may be something disintegrating in her complacence and in the complacence of society regarding her. ”

“ I said to the Professor, “you will remember the things science once undertook to tell us about the great dualities. ‘Witness,’ said science, with not a glimmer of insincerity, ‘the beautiful interdependence of the two lobes of the cerebrum! How marvellous is their union! Each individual in form and function, yet working in an eternal harmony. One cannot get along without the other. Let one side of the brain be hurt and the other droops in sympathetic inactivity.’ This was lovely. It fortified every advocate of the fitness of marriage. ”

“ Who can tell what passes in the heart of a woman? Who can read her as she reads her letters over there in the corner of the summer hotel verandah? Who can say what she is thinking there in the shadow of the birch-tree picking off the petals? “He loves me—he loves me not”—no, surely something more modern. What could be more piquing than that partnership—nature and a woman? If she chooses to take another member into the firm, that is her affair. ”