The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays Volume I Part 3

_FEMININE AFFECTATIONS._

The old form of feminine affectation used to be that of a die-away fine lady afflicted with a mysterious malady known by the name of the vapours, or one, no less obscure, called the spleen. Sometimes it was an etherealized being who had no capacity for homely things, but who pa.s.sed her life in an atmosphere of poetry and music, for the most part expressing her vague ideas in halting rhymes which gave more satisfaction to herself than to her friends. She was probably an Italian scholar and could quote Petrarch and Ta.s.so, and did quote them pretty often; she might even be a Della Cruscan by honourable election, with her own peculiar wreath of laurel and her own silver lyre; any way she was 'a sister of the Muses,' and had something to do with Apollo or Minerva, whom she was sure to call Phoebus or Pallas Athene, as being the more poetical name of the two. Probably she had dealings with Diana too--for this kind of woman does not in any age affect the 'seaborn,' save in a hazy sentimental way that bears no fruits--a neatly-turned sonnet or a clever bit of counterpoint being to her worth all the manly love or fireside home delights that the world can give. What is the touch of babies' dimpled fingers or the rosy kisses of babies' lips compared to the pleasures of being a sister of the Muses and one of the beloved of Apollo! The Della Cruscan of former days, or her modern avatar, will tell you that music and poetry are G.o.dlike and bear the soul away to heaven, but that the nursery is a prison and babies are no dearer gaolers than any other; and that household duties disgrace the aspiring soul mounting to the empyrean. This was the Ethereal Being of last generation--the Blue-stocking, as a poetess in white satin, with her eyes turned up to heaven and her hair in dishevelled cascades about her neck. She dropped her mantle as she finally departed; and we still have the Della Cruscan essence, if not in the precise form of earlier times. We still have ethereal beings who, as the practical outcome of their etherealization, rave about music and poetry and aesthetics and culture, and horribly neglect their babies and the weekly bills.

A favourite form of feminine affectation among certain opposers of the prevalent fast type is in an intense womanliness--an aggravating intensity of womanliness--that makes one long for a little roughness, just to take off the cloying excess of sweetness. This kind is generally found with large eyes, dark in the lids and hollow in the orbit, by which a certain spiritual expression is given to the face--a certain look of being consumed by the hidden fire of lofty thought, that is very effective. It does not destroy the effectiveness that the real cause of the darkened lids and cavernous...o...b..ts is most probably internal disease, when not antimony. Eyes of this sort stand for spirituality and loftiness of thought and intense womanliness of nature; and, as all men are neither chemists nor doctors, the simulation does quite as well as truth.

The main characteristic of these women is self-consciousness. They live before a moral mirror, and pa.s.s their time in att.i.tudinizing to what they think the best advantage. They can do nothing simply, nothing spontaneously and without the fullest consciousness as to how they do it, and how they look while they are doing it. In every action of their lives they see themselves as pictures, as characters in a novel, as impersonations of poetic images or thoughts. If they give you a gla.s.s of water, or take your cup from you, they are Youth and Beauty ministering to Strength or Age, as the case may be; if they bring you a photographic alb.u.m, they are t.i.tian's Daughter carrying her casket, a trifle modernized; if they hold a child in their arms, they are Madonnas, and look unutterable maternal love though they never saw the little creature before, and care for it no more than for the puppy in the mews; if they do any small personal office, or attempt to do it--making believe to tie a shoestring, comb out a curl, fasten a b.u.t.ton--they are Charities in graceful att.i.tudes, and expect you to think them both charitable and graceful. Nine times out of ten they can neither tie the string nor fasten the b.u.t.ton with ordinary deftness--for they have a trick of using only the ends of their fingers when they do anything with their hands, as being more graceful and fitting in better, than would a firmer grasp, with the delicate womanliness of the character; and the less sweet and more commonplace woman who does not att.i.tudinize morally and never parades her womanliness, beats them out of the field for real helpfulness, and is the Charity which the other only plays at being.

This kind too affects, in theory, wonderful submissiveness to man. It upholds Griselda as the type of feminine perfection, and--still in theory--between independence and being tyrannized over, goes in for the tyranny. 'I would rather my husband beat me than let me do too much as I liked,' said one before she married, who, after she was married, managed to get entire possession of the domestic reins and took good care that her nominal lord should be her practical slave.

For, notwithstanding the sweet submissiveness of her theory, the intensely womanly woman has the most astonis.h.i.+ng knack of getting her own way and imposing her own will on others. The real tyrant among women is not the one who flounces and splutters and declares that nothing shall make her obey, but this soft-mannered, large-eyed, intensely womanly person who says that Griselda is her ideal and that the whole duty of woman lies in unquestioning obedience to man.

In contrast with this special affectation is the mannish woman--the woman who wears a double-breasted coat with big b.u.t.tons, of which she flings back the lappels with an air, understanding the suggestiveness of a wide chest and the need of unchecked breathing; who wears unmistakeable s.h.i.+rt-fronts, linen collars, vests and plain ties, like a man; who folds her arms or sets them akimbo, like a man; who even nurses her feet and cradles her knees, in spite of her petticoats, and makes believe that the att.i.tude is comfortable because it is manlike.

If the excessively womanly woman is affected in her sickly sweetness, the mannish woman is affected in her breadth and roughness. She adores dogs and horses, which she places far above children of all ages. She boasts of how good a marksman she is--she does not call herself markswoman--and how she can hit right and left and bring down both birds flying. When she drinks wine she holds the stem of the gla.s.s between her first two fingers, hollows her underlip, and, throwing her head well back, tosses off the whole at a draught--she would disdain the lady-like sip or the closer gesture of ordinary women. She is great in cheese and bitter-beer, in claret-cup and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of effervescing wines.

She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward, as men round their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw. For charms to her watch-chain she wears a cork-screw, a gimlet, a big knife and a small foot-rule; and in contrast with the intensely womanly woman, who uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman when she does anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of which is affectation--from first to last affectation; a mere a.s.sumption of virile fas.h.i.+ons utterly inharmonious to the whole being, physical and mental, of a woman.

Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a personal insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact limits of her mental sphere. This is the woman who a.s.sumes to be the antiseptic element in society; who makes believe that without her the world and human nature would go to the dogs and plunge headlong into the abyss of sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand heroism of man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavour and patient seeking after truth would serve his turn or the world's if she did not spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the boundary lines within which she would confine the range of thought and speculation. She knows that this a.s.sumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affectation, and that other minds have as much right to their own boundary lines as that which she claims for herself: but it seems to her pretty to a.s.sume that woman generally is the consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that she, of all women, is most specially consecrated. As an offshoot of this kind stands the affectation of simplicity--the woman whose mental att.i.tude is self-depreciation, and who poses herself as a mere n.o.body when the world is ringing with her praises. 'Is it possible that your Grace has ever heard of _me_?' said one of this cla.s.s with prettily affected _navete_ at a time when all England was astir about her, and when colours and fas.h.i.+ons went by her name to make them take with the public at large. No one knew better than the fair _ingenue_ in question how far and wide her fame had spread; but she thought it looked modest and simple to a.s.sume ignorance of her own value, and to declare that she was but a creeping worm when all the world knew that she was a soaring b.u.t.terfly.

There is a certain like kind of affectation very common among pretty women; and this is the affectation of not knowing that they are pretty, and not recognizing the effect of their beauty on men. Take a woman with bewildering eyes, say, of a maddening size and shape and fringed with long lashes which distract you to look at; the creature knows that her eyes are bewildering, as well as she knows that fire burns and that ice melts; she knows the effect of that trick she has with them--the sudden uplifting of the heavy lid and the swift, full gaze that she gives right into a man's eyes. She has practised it often in the gla.s.s, and knows to a mathematical nicety the exact height to which the lid must be raised and the exact fixity of the gaze. She knows the whole meaning of the look and the stirring of men's blood that it creates; but if you speak to her of the effect of her trick, she puts on an air of extremest innocence, and protests her entire ignorance as to anything her eyes may say or mean; and if you press her hard she will look at you in the same way for your own benefit, and deny at the very moment of offence. Various other tricks has she with those bewildering eyes of hers--each more perilous than the other to men's peace; and all unsparingly employed, no matter what the result. For this is the woman who flirts to the extreme limits, then suddenly draws up and says she meant nothing. Step by step she has led you on, with looks and smiles and pretty doubtful phrases always susceptible of two meanings--the one for the ear by mere word, the other for the heart by the accompaniments of look and manner, which are intangible; step by step she has drawn you deeper and deeper into the maze where she has gone before as your decoy; then, when she has you safe, she raises her eyes for the last time, complains that you have mistaken her cruelly and that she has meant nothing more than any one else might mean; and what can she do to repair her mistake?

Love you? marry you? No; she is engaged to your rival, who counts his thousands to your hundreds; and what a pity that you had not seen this all along and that you should have so misunderstood her! Besides, what is there about her that you or any one should love?

Of all the many affectations of women, this affectation of their own harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when they practise their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most dangerous and the most disastrous. But what can one say to them? The very fact that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his perception until too late. That men love though they suffer is the woman's triumph, guilt and condonation; and so long as the trick succeeds it will be practised.

Another affectation of the same family is the extreme friendliness and familiarity which some women adopt in their manners towards men. Young girls affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a year or so older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate, declare they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may not be natural! This form of affectation, once begun, continues through life; being too convenient to be lightly discarded; and youthful matrons not long out of their teens a.s.sume a tone and ways that would befit middle age counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous even then if the 'Indian summer' were specially bright and warm.

Then there is that affectation pure and simple which is the mere affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of att.i.tude which by consciousness ceases to be grace, and the thousand little _minauderies_ and coquetries of the s.e.x known to us all. And there is the affectation which people of a higher social sphere show when they condescend to those of low estate, and talk and look as if they are not quite certain of their company, and scarcely know if they are Christian or heathen, savage or civilized. And there is the affectation of the maternal pa.s.sion with women who are never by any chance seen with their children, but who speak of them as if they were never out of their sight; the affectation of wifely adoration with women who are to be met about the world with every man of their acquaintance rather than with their lawful husbands; the affectation of asceticism in women who lead a self-enjoying life from end to end; and the affectation of political fervour in those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to save Europe from universal revolution.

Go where we will, the affectation of being something she is not meets us in woman, like a ghost we cannot lay, a mist we cannot sweep away.

In the holiest and the most trivial things we find it penetrating everywhere--even in church and at her prayers, when the pretty penitent, rising from her lengthy orisons, lifts her eyes and furtively looks about to see who has noticed her self-abas.e.m.e.nt and to whom her picturesque piety has commended itself. All sorts and patterns of good girls and pleasant women are very dear and delightful; but the pearl of great price is the thoroughly natural and unaffected woman--that is, the woman who is truthful to her heart's core, and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she would dare to tell a lie.

_INTERFERENCE._

About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. We do not mean tyranny; that is another matter--tyranny being active while interference is negative--the one standing as the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of the same principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some personal gain in view when it takes it in hand to force people to do what they dislike to do; while interference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply prevents the exercise of free-will for the mere pleasure to be had out of such prevention.

Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than domestic; but the curse of interference is seen most distinctly within the four walls of home, where also it is most felt. Very many people spend their lives in interfering with others--perpetually putting spokes into wheels with the turning of which they have nothing to do, and thrusting their fingers into pies about the baking of which they are in no way concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women make up the larger number and are the greater sinners. To be sure there are some men--small, fussy, finnicking fellows, with whom nature has made the irreparable blunder of s.e.x--who are as troublesome in their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the feminine characteristics of men are so exceptional that we need not take them into serious calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in any manly sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a right to control--say, with the wife's low dresses or the daughter's too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and, knowing what other men say of such displays, or fearing their effect, they stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But this kind of interference, n.o.ble or ign.o.ble as the cause may be, comes into another cla.s.s of motives altogether and does not belong to that kind of interference of which we are speaking.

Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other and with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to church and subscribing to their favourite mission, so much as they tell us what we are not to do. They do not command so much as they forbid. And, of all women, wives and daughters are the most given to handling these check-strings and putting on these drag-chains.

Sisters, while young, are obliged to be less interfering, under pain of a perpetual round of bickering; for brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of creatures for the most part so loftily snubbed as sisters; while mothers nine times out of ten are laid aside for all but sentimental purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be a boy and has learned to become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of personal and domestic interference lies with wives, and they know how to use the prerogative they a.s.sume. Take an unlucky man who smokes under protest--his wife not liking to forbid the pleasure entirely, but always grudging it and interfering with its exercise. Each cigar represents a battle, deepening in intensity according to the number.

The first may have been had with only a light skirmish--perhaps a mere threatening of an attack that pa.s.sed away without coming to actual onslaught; the second brings up the artillery; while the third or fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets the big guns thundering.

She could understand a man smoking one cigar in the day, she says, with a gracious condescension to masculine weakness; but when it comes to more she feels that she is called on to interfere, and to do her best towards checking such a reprehensible excess. It does not weaken her position that she knows nothing of what she is talking about. She never smoked a cigar herself, therefore does not understand the uses nor the abuses of tobacco; but she holds herself pledged to interfere so soon as she gets the chance; and she redeems that pledge with energy.

The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appet.i.te to correspond, but about whom the home superst.i.tion is that he has a feeble digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the gauntlet of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines nor sups jollily with his friends without being plucked at and reminded that salmon always disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a headache to-morrow; and, 'My dear! when you know how bad salad is for you!' or, 'How can you eat that horrid pastry? You will be so ill in the night!' 'What! more wine? another gla.s.s of whisky? how foolish you are! how wrong!' The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear stimulants; the husband is a strong, large-framed man who can drink deep without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit is her husband's measure, and when he has gone beyond the range of her own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks herself justified in interfering with his further progress. For women cannot be brought to understand the capacities of a man's life; they cannot be made to understand that what is bad for themselves may not be bad for others, and that their weakness ought not to be the gauge of a man's strength.

A pale, chilly woman, afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears furs and velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East Indian fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, father, sons, in about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must not go out without an overcoat; they must take an umbrella if the day is at all cloudy; they must not walk too far nor ride too hard; and they must be sure to be at home by a given hour.

When such women as these have to do with men just on the boundary-line between the last days of vigour and the first of old age, they put forward the time of old age by many years. We see their men rapidly sink into the softness and incapacity of senility, when a more bracing life would have kept them good for half-a-dozen years longer. But women do not care for this. They like men to be their own companions and dread rather than desire the masculine comrades.h.i.+p which would keep them up to the mark of virile independence; for most women--but not all--would rather have their husbands manly in a womanly way than in a manly one, as being more within the compa.s.s of their own sympathies and understanding.

The same kind of interference is very common where the husband is a man of broad humour--one who calls a spade a spade, with no circ.u.mlocution about an agricultural implement. According to the odd law of compensation which regulates so much of human action, the wife of such a man is generally one of the ultra-refined kind, who thinks herself consecrated the enduring censor of her husband's speech. As this is an example most frequently to be found in middle life and where there are children belonging to the establishment, the word of warning is generally 'papa!'--said with reproach or resentment, according to circ.u.mstances--which has, of course, the effect of drawing the attention of the young people to the paternal breadth of speech, and of fixing that special breach of decorum on their memory.

Sometimes the wife has sufficient self-restraint not to give the word of warning in public, but can nurse her displeasure for a more convenient season; but so soon as they are alone the miserable man has to pa.s.s under the harrow, as only husbands with wives of a chastising spirit can pa.s.s under it, and his life is made a burden to him because of that unlucky anecdote told with such verve a few hours ago, and received with such shouts of pleasant laughter. Perhaps the anecdote was just a trifle doubtful; granted; but what does the wife take by her remonstrance? Most probably a quarrel; possibly a good-natured _peccavi_ for the sake of being let off the continuance of the sermon; perhaps a yawn; most certainly not reform. If the man be a man of free speech and broad humour by nature and liking, he will remain so to the end; and what the censors.h.i.+p of society leaves untouched, the interference of a wife will not control.

Children come in for an enormous share of interference, which is not direction nor discipline, but simple interference for its own sake.

There are mothers who meddle with every expression of individuality in their young people, quite irrespective of moral tendency, or whether the occasion is trivial or important. In the fancies, the pleasures, the minor details of dress in their children, there is always that intruding maternal finger upsetting the arrangements of the poor little pie as vigorously as if thrones and altars depended on the result. Not a game of any kind can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn instead of a pink, without maternal interference; so that the bloom is rubbed off every enjoyment, and life becomes reduced to a kind of goose-step, with mamma for the drill-sergeant prescribing the inches to be marked. Sisters, too, do a great deal of this kind of thing among each other; as all those who are intimate in houses where there are large families of unmarried girls must have seen. The nudges, the warning looks, the deprecating 'Amy's!' and 'Oh, Lucy's!' and 'Hush, Rose's!' by which some seek to act as household police over the others, are patent to all who use their senses. In some houses the younger sisters seem to have been born chiefly as training grounds for the elders, whereon they may exercise their powers of interference; and a hard time they have of it. If Emma goes to her embroidery, Ellen tells her she ought to practise her singing; if Jane is reading, Mary recommends sewing as a more profitable use of precious time; if Amy is at her easel, Ada wants to turn her round to the piano. It is quite the exception where four or five sisters leave each other free to do as each likes, and do not take to drilling and interference as part of the daily programme.

Something of the reluctance to domestic service, so painfully apparent among the better cla.s.s of working women, is due to this spirit of interference with women. The lady who wrote about the caps and gowns of servant-girls, and drew out a plan of dress, down to the very material of their gloves, was an instance of this spirit. For, when we come to a.n.a.lyze it, what does it really signify to us how our servants dress, so long as they are clean and decent and do not let their garments damage our goods? Fas.h.i.+on is almost always ridiculous, and women, as a rule, care more for dress than they care for anything else; and if the kitchen apes the parlour, and Phyllis gives as much thought to her new linsey as my lady gives to her new velvet, we cannot wonder at it, nor need we hold up our hands in horror at the depravity of the smaller person. Does one flight of stairs transpose morality? If it does not, there is no real ethical reason why my lady should interfere with poor Phyllis's enjoyment in her ugly little vanities, when she herself will not be interfered with--though press and pulpit both try to turn her out of her present path into the way which all ages have thought the best for her and the one naturally appointed. It is a thing that will not bear reasoning on, being simply a form of the old 'who will guard the guardian?' Who will direct the directress? and to whose interference will the interferer submit?

There are two causes for this excessive love of interference among women. The one is the narrowness of their lives and objects, by which insignificant things gain a disproportionate value in their eyes; the other, their belief that they are the only saviours of society, and that without them man would become hopelessly corrupt. And to a certain extent this belief is true; but surely with restrictions!

Because the clearer moral sense and greater physical weakness of women restrain men's fiercer pa.s.sions and force them to be gentle and considerate, women are not, therefore, the sole arbiters of masculine life into whose hands is given the paying out of just so much rope as they think fit for the occasion. They would do better to look to their own tackle before settling so exactly the run of others; and if ever their desired time of equality is to come, it must come through mutual independence, not through womanly interference, and as much liberality and breadth given as demanded:--which, so far as humanity has gone hitherto, has not been the feminine manner of squaring accounts.

Grant that women are the salt of the earth and the great antiseptic element in society, still that does not reduce everything else to the verge of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet they evidently think that it is so, and that they are each and all the keepers of keys which give them a special entrance to the temple of morality, and by which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser body of men. Hence they interfere and restrict and pay out just so much rope, and measure off just so much gambolling ground, as they think fit; then think vile man a horribly wicked invention when he takes things into his own hand and goes beyond their boundary-lines. It is all done in good if in a very narrow faith--that we admit willingly; but we would call their attention to the difference there is between influence and interference; which is just the difference between their ideal duty and their daily practice--between being the salt of the earth and the blister of the home.

We think it only justice to put in a word for those poor henpecked fellows of husbands at a time when the whole cry is for Woman's Rights, which seems to mean chiefly her right of making man knuckle under on all occasions and of making one will serve for two lives--and that will hers. We a.s.sure her that she would get her own way in large matters much more easily if she would leave men more liberty in small ones, and not teaze them by interfering in things which do not concern her and have only reference to themselves.

_THE FAs.h.i.+ONABLE WOMAN._

Among the many odd products of a mature civilization, the fas.h.i.+onable woman is one of the oddest. From first to last she is an amazing spectacle; and if we take human life in any earnestness at all, whether individually, as the pa.s.sage to an eternal existence the condition of which depends on what we are here, or collectively, as the highest thing we know, we can only look in blank astonishment at the fas.h.i.+onable woman and her career. She is the one sole capable member of the human family without duties and without useful occupation; the one sole being who might be swept out of existence altogether, without deranging the nice arrangement of things, or upsetting the balance of inter-dependent forces. We know of no other organic creation of which this could be said; but the fas.h.i.+onable woman is not as other creatures, being, fortunately, _sui generis_, and of a type not existing elsewhere. If we take the mere ordering of her days and the employment of her time as the sign of her mental state, we may perhaps measure to a certain extent, but not fully, the depth of inanity into which she has fallen and the immensity of her folly. Considering her as a being with the potentiality of reason, of usefulness, of thought, the actual result is surely the saddest and the strangest thing under heaven!

She goes to bed at dawn and does not attempt to rise till noon. For the most part she breakfasts in bed, and then amuses herself with a cursory glance at the morning paper, if she have sufficient energy for so great a mental exertion; if she have not, she lies for another hour or two in that half-slumberous state which is so destructive to mind and body, weakening as it does both fibre and resolution, both muscle and good principle. At last she languidly rises, to be dressed in time for luncheon and her favoured intimates--the men who have the _entree_ at sacred hours when the world in general is forbidden. Some time later she dresses again for her drive--for the first part of the day's serious business; for paying visits and leaving cards; for buying jewelry and dresses, and ordering all sorts of unnecessary things at her milliner's; for this grand lady's ordinary 'day,' and that grand lady's extraordinary At Home; for her final slow parade in the Park, where she sees her friends as in an open air drawing-room, makes private appointments, carries on flirtations, and hears and retails gossip and scandal of a full flavour. Then she goes home to dress for tea in a 'lovely gown' of suggestive piquancy; to be followed by dinner, the opera or a concert, a _soiree_, or perhaps a ball or two; whence she returns towards morning, flushed with excitement or worn out with fatigue, feverish or nervous, as she has had pleasure and success or disappointment and annoyance.

This is her outside life; and this is no fancy picture and no exaggeration. After a certain time of such an existence, can we wonder if her complexion fades and her eyes grow dim? if that inexpressible air of haggard weariness creeps over her, which ages even a young girl and makes a mature woman substantially an old one? It is then that she has recourse to those foul and fatal expedients of which we have heard more than enough in these latter days. She will not try simplicity of living, natural hours, wholesome occupation, unselfish endeavour, but rushes off for help to paints and cosmetics, to stimulants and drugs, and attempts to restore the tarnished freshness of her beauty by the very means which further corrode it. Every now and then, for very weariness when not for idleness, she feigns herself sick and has her favourite physician to attend her. In fact the funniest thing about her is the ease with which she takes to her bed on the slightest provocation, and the strange pleasure she seems to find in what is a penance to most women.

You meet her in a heated, crowded, noisy room, looking just as she always looks, whatever her normal state of health may be; and in answer to your inquiries she tells you she has only two hours ago left her bed to come here, having been confined to her room for a week, with Dr. Blank in close attendance. If you are an intimate female friend she will whisper you the name of her malady, which is sure to be something terrific, and which, if true, would have kept her a real invalid for months instead of days; but if you are only a man she will make herself out to have been very ill indeed in a more mysterious way, and leave you to wonder at the extraordinary physique of fas.h.i.+onable women, which enables them to live on the most friendly touch-and-go terms with death, and to overcome mortal maladies by an effort of the will and the delights of a ducal ball. The favourite physician has a hard time of it with these ladies; and the more popular he is the harder his work. It is well for his generation when he is a man of honour and integrity, and knows how to add self-respect and moral power to the qualities which have made him the general favourite. For his influence over women is almost unlimited--like nothing so much as that of the handsome Abbe of the Regency or the fascinating Monsignore of Rome; and if he chooses to abuse it and turn it to evil issues, he can. And, however great the merit in him that he does not, it does not lessen the demerit of the woman that he could.

Sometimes the fas.h.i.+onable woman takes up with the clergyman instead of the physician, and coquets with religious exercises rather than with drugs; but neither clergyman nor physician can change her mode of life nor give her truth nor common-sense. Sometimes there is a fluttering show of art-patronage, and the fas.h.i.+onable woman has a handsome painter or well-bred musician in her train, whom she pets publicly and patronizes graciously. Sometimes it is a young poet or a rising novelist, considerably honoured by the a.s.sociation, who dedicates his next novel to her, or writes verses in her praise, with such fervency of grat.i.tude as sets the base Philistines on the scent of the secret--perhaps guessing not far amiss. For the fas.h.i.+onable woman has always some love-affair on hand, more or less platonic according to her own temperament or the boldness of the man--a love-affair in which the smallest ingredient is love; a love-affair which is vanity, idleness, a dissolute imagination and contempt of such prosaic things as morals; a love-affair not even to be excused by the tragic frenzy of earnest pa.s.sion, and which may be guilty and yet not true.

The physical effects of such a life as this are as bad as the mental, and both are as bad as the worst can make them. A feverish, overstrained condition of health either prevents the fas.h.i.+onable woman from being a mother at all, or makes her the mother of nervous, sickly children. Many a woman of high rank is at this moment paying bitterly for the disappointment of which she herself, in her illimitable folly, has been the sole and only cause. And, whether women like to hear it or not, it is none the less a truth that part of the reason for their being born at all is that they may in their turn bear children. The unnatural feeling against maternity existing among fas.h.i.+onable women is one of the worst mental signs of their state, as their frequent inability to be mothers is one of the worst physical results.

This is a condition of things which no false modesty nor timid reserve should keep in the background, for it is a question of national importance, and will soon become one of national disaster unless checked by a healthier current and more natural circ.u.mstances.

Dress, dissipation and flirting make up the questionable lines which enclose the life of the fas.h.i.+onable woman, and which enclose nothing useful, nothing good, nothing deep nor true nor holy. Her piety is a pastime; her art the poorest pretence; her pleasure consists only in hurry and excitement alternating with debasing sloth, in heartless coquetry or in lawless indulgence, as nature made her more vain or more sensual. As a wife she fulfils no wifely duty in any grand or loving sense, for the most part regarding her husband only as a banker or an adjunct, according to the terms of her marriage settlement; as a mother she is a stranger to her children, to whom nurse and governess supply her place and give such poor makes.h.i.+ft for maternal love as they are enabled or inclined. In no domestic relation is she of the smallest value, and of none in any social circ.u.mstance beside the adorning of a room--if she be pretty--and the help she gives to trade through her expenditure. She lives only in the gaslight, and her nature at last becomes as artificial as her habits.

As years go on, and she changes from the acknowledged belle to _la femme pa.s.see_, she goes through a period of frantic endeavour to retain her youth; and even when time has clutched her with too firm a hand to be shaken off, and she begins to feel the infirmities which she still puts out all her strength to conceal, even then she grasps at the departing shadow and fresh daubs the crumbling ruin, in the belief that the world's eyes are dim and that stucco may pa.s.s for marble for another year or two longer. Or she becomes a Belgravian mother, with daughters to sell to the highest bidder; and then the aim of her life is to secure the purchaser. Her daughters are never objects of real love with the fas.h.i.+onable woman. They are essentially her rivals, and the idea of carrying on her life in theirs, of forgetting herself in them, occurs to her only as a forecast of death.

She shrinks even from her sons, as living evidences of the lapse of time which she cannot deny, and awkward _memoria technica_ for fixing dates; and there is not a home presided over by a fas.h.i.+onable woman where the family is more than a mere name, a mere social convention loosely held together by circ.u.mstances, not by love.

Closing such a life as this comes the unhonoured end, when the miserable made-up old creature totters down into the grave where paint and padding, and glossy plaits cut from some fresh young head, are of no more avail; and where death, which makes all things real, reduces her life of lies to the nothingness it has been from the beginning.

What does she leave behind her? A memory by which her children may order their own lives in proud a.s.surance that so they will order them best for virtue and for honour? Or a memory which speaks to them of time misused, of duties unfulfilled, of love discarded for pleasure, and of a life-long sacrifice of all things good and pure for selfishness?

We all know examples of the worldly old woman clinging batlike to the last to the old roofs and rafters; and we all know how heartily we despise her, and how we ridicule her in our hearts, if not by our words. If the reigning queens of fas.h.i.+on, at present young and beautiful, would but remember that they are only that worldly old woman in embryo, and that in a very few years they will be her exact likeness, unhappily repeated for the scorn of the world once more to follow! The traditional skeleton at the feast had a wonderfully wise meaning, crude and gross as it was in form. For though its _memento mori_, too constantly before us, would either sadden or brutalize, as we were thoughtful or licentious, yet it is good to see the end of ourselves, and to study the meaning and lesson of our lives in those of our prototypes and elder likenesses.

The pleasures of the world are, as we all know, very potent and very alluring, but nothing can be more unsatisfying if taken as the main purpose of life. While we are young, the mere stirring of the blood stands instead of anything more real; but as we go on, and the pulse flags and pleasurable occasions get rare and more rare, we find that we have been like the Prodigal Son, and that our food and his have been out of much the same trough, and come in the main to much the same thing.