Alexander Black

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then he patiently outlined his theory that it was bad art to have the clothes follow the figure. The American, he thought, dressed too timidly. The effect of the American’s clothes was too sweet. ‘A man should look superior to his clothes,’ he maintained. ‘And so,’ I said, ‘you have inferior clothes. How can a man better indicate his superiority to his clothes, how can he better dominate them, than by making them fit him?’ a remark which seemed to convince him that I was hopeless. At all events, he confessed that he’d never before had a girl find fault with his clothes. ”

“ I 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. ”

“ I asked patiently, “who was the dwarf?”
“The spirit of romance, of course, the principle which insists that something shall happen every thousand words—Oh, an entertaining and well-meaning fellow, promising that everything shall come out all right in the end, whatever happens. But you can’t trust him. And if he does fling his hand at the end and assure you that everything is all right, is everything all right? Do the scars count for nothing? Will the interest of joy on the investment of misery prove to be a fair compensation? [79] Realism doesn’t promise so much. ”

“ You ask nothing and you get everything—everything but the greatest thing of all.”
“You have left out some things,” said Tranton, smiling, “several important things.” He seemed to be going over these in his mind. “It is quite natural. You couldn’t know. We all have to persuade ourselves—unless we are a complaining bore—that life has great compensations for us. We have to stay satisfied. An optimist such as I am is like one of those story-telling liars who repeatedly [168] increase the figures, not merely to assure the astonishment of each new listener, but to keep up their own interest.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Only a very real woman will admit that she is hungry. Does it not occur to you that we all are living some story, and that some of us who are romanticists at heart live realism by force of circumstances; and that some of us who are realists are forced to yield to the inexorable momentum of romance? ”

“ If every husband contrives to let his wife know how he likes to be managed, every daughter may find ways of making the yoke of her daughterhood exceeding light. In the debated matter of authority the American mother gives that she may receive. I don’t suppose there ever was a more perfect partnership, taken at its best, than the partnership of an American mother and her daughter, until marriage, which dissolves all other partnerships, brings its great readjustments.... ”

“ But the dwarf held to the point. ‘Whom Love loveth he perplexeth. First make her doubt,’ he said, ‘or she never will believe.’ Then the dwarf went to the heroine. ‘Your Highness,’ he began, then dropped his flourish, and stepping close to her, whispered: ‘You are making a great mistake. [76] You never can hold the prince. You act like a shop girl who has won the floor walker. You have the engaged look in its most silly form. ”

“ There is in Chicago a certain street corner around which the Lake wind, which already has made some progress through the city, swings with a zest that might indicate an intention to illustrate in a grotesque continuous performance the Lake wind’s utter irreverence and frivolity. Most Chicagoans know the wind’s mood at this corner, and when you sit in the window of the club it is quite possible to pick out the frequenters of the district by the mechanical way they grasp their hats as they approach the known border of this current of air. ”

“ But I should insist that all this is romance. You are a heroine, and if I am not a hero, I am playing leading man just now, which has great possibilities. We are being hurled through space at a speed of sixty miles an hour. ”

“ Even the Walking Gentleman must be presumed to have certain human impulses. Perhaps he can’t even find out who is the leading lady. Perhaps the girl who seems designed by nature to be the heroine, the girl who, if he were the Hero and not the Walking Gentleman, would make his duty clear, betrays a singular indifference to the Hero, the Hero’s understudy, and all the rest of them. ”

“ Certainly a chaperon who took herself solemnly would scarcely fit into our American scheme.”
“As for that, no one who takes himself solemnly fits very well into our American scheme, though I have noticed that we Americans take many things seriously which we assume to carry with lightness, even with levity. I often suspect that we differ more from other peoples in our insistence upon this appearance of lightness than in our actual social qualities.” ”

“ But the modern woman, in a greater degree than any of her predecessors, enjoys the graces of chance, knows how to turn defeat into victory. She can marry the wrong man [155] and never even let him know it. She can marry the right man and not upset him by making that too plain either. She can elude marriage altogether and make that seem not merely manifest destiny but a triumph of beneficent fate. She can be self-respectingly married and enchantingly single—”
Miss Rittingway checked me with a look. ”

“ Tranton himself personified something of the same conventionality relieved by difference. In the outer world he was so well dressed that no one ever spoke of his clothes, just as his place in society was so important and secure that no one ever called him a “society man.” He was old enough to have met a great many people; young enough still to have an open account with the affections. ”

“ You can see that matrimony might get some comfort out of it just as golf does. It might enjoy the flattery of being the greatest game even if every one doesn’t choose to play, even if certain charming women do choose to cover their emotions with a veil of sophistry as they cover their books with brown paper. ”

“ There are men who are immense fun—once; girls who are witty and fascinating—the first time. Others have a long run,—for weeks, months, even years. But you can’t say how long a run they would have if you married them.”
“Tranton,” I said, “that is the way you talk to them. I know you. I simply won’t listen to your make-believe.”
“Oh, I am told that girls change a good deal during their married era,” went on Tranton, blowing the smoke at his bronze mandarin; “that would help keep it from being monotonous. Marriage itself is bound to change us when less revolutionary things are so potent. ”

“ I pursued in defiance of Miss Velrose’s irony, “he must be definite. I once heard a girl say, ‘I believe I was proposed to last night, but I am not sure.’ Some men weakly dread to ask the old question in the old way. They introduce dangerous artistic variations.”
“Generally,” declared Miss Velrose, “it isn’t art; it is caution. They wish to be dead sure before they are quite definite. They are like governments who throw out a hint of a proposed movement to see how much and how many of the newspapers will howl.” ”

“ A realistic marriage is as intensely qualified as an emotion by Henry James. You may not discern the string that is attached to it. But it is there. The author likes to leave that reservation rankling in your mind. I love thorough-going romance for one thing: its habit of not annoying you with qualifying elements. It likes to stir things up prodigiously, but it isn’t mean about it. ”

“ One of the cleverest and most happily married women I know was engaged six times. You never can tell. It is not fair to expect that the personal responsibility of choice which we have placed upon the American girl will not sometimes be attended with aberrations. There may be much of entertainment in being successively engaged. Yet I have no doubt but that the habit is degenerate.”
Miss Rittingway looked uncommonly serious for a moment. “We all know,” she said, “that the most dangerous period in a girl’s life is that immediately following a broken engagement. ”

“ Nowadays, we have to do a heap of guessing as to the embodied element in the heroines we read about. We all have prejudices, and it is nice to get rid of them at the beginning. I knew of a New England lady who was immensely disappointed in her new pastor because, as she said, she ‘never could abide a minister who was light complected.’”
“I am sorry to rob you of the privilege of fashioning the physical heroine after your own fancy. I always like to have at least a little of my own way in the matter of the hero. When he is described too circumstantially there is nothing left for me. ”

“ I know married people who are happy, and single people who are unhappy. I have seen the tall girl and the short man, and the tall man and the short girl, illustrate the splendid paradoxes [34] of pairing. I believe that marriage is just as good and just as bad as the people who illustrate it. But I haven’t been able to get up any personal interest in it, any more than I have been able to get up a personal interest in the law or medicine. After all, marriage is a career. I don’t hate the Church because I do not feel called to preach. ”

“ Do you know you explained some things to me so beautifully a moment ago that I am tempted to put your sophistry—I mean your scientific analysis—to the crucial test. Let me do this in a word:—We have spoken of clothes, and we have spoken of transit. Why do women get off a public vehicle backward? I say public vehicle advisedly, for I have seen a woman get on and off a horse properly—assisted. I have seen her get off a bicycle properly, unassisted. I have even seen her get out of a coach properly. But few men have ever seen a woman leave a trolley-car or a railway-coach otherwise than backwards. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Kissing, long condemned both by science and by cynicism, survives variously and without apparent abatement. But we can not doubt that it is doomed. It may be the last of the inter-personal physical salutations to disappear; yet it must go. It is enough that we think, or at most look, our cordiality, and a woman, trained to these subtle readings, could not see a man physically kneel without laughing. ”

“ There is a strange, and, as yet, unexplained impulse to which women yield when the moment of choice comes. Every day I see women get off the wrong way at real inconvenience. They are like Jerome K. Jerome’s stage villain who doesn’t want to be a villain, who is not profited by being a villain, but who, quite uncomplainingly, [57] goes on being the villain in obedience to the unities. ”

“ And how can a girl try to like matrimony without trying to like men? I ought not to be feminine enough to remind you that men have been known to ‘forget to whom.’ Do you see that young fellow coming up the path with the girl in white duck? ”

“ In the country I hope you lead such a life that the gymnasium would be absurd there. But in the city it is very different for all of us, but especially for you women. The clothes you usually wear here presuppose that you will suspend, while wearing them, the use or development of most of your muscles. Some of the time you will wear a bicycle skirt and ride a wheel. But the bicycle uses but one set of muscles. Your walking and dancing, with some tennis and an occasional run out to the links for golf, all leave the symmetrical development incomplete in some way. ”

“ I have no doubt that what you have intimated with regard to the dexterities imposed by the skirt is quite true. There must be a certain important amount of muscular power not otherwise demanded in the current method of holding up the skirt with one hand at the back, or even in twisting the loose of it into a tuft on one hip. The habit doesn’t seem to be intrinsically pretty, yet it has that fascination which makes us wonder whether conventional ideas of beauty are of any importance whatever. ”