The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays Volume Ii Part 7

Another reason why women are more patient than men during sickness is that they can amuse themselves better. One gets tired of reading all day long with the aching eyes and weary brain of weakness; yet how few things a man can do to amuse himself without too great an effort, and without being dependent on others! But women have a thousand pretty little devices for whiling away the heavy hours. They can vary their finger-work almost infinitely, and they find real pleasure in a new st.i.tch or a stripe of a different colour and design from the last. In the contempt in which needlework in all its forms is held by the advanced cla.s.s of women, its use during the period of convalescence, when it helps the lagging time as nothing else can, is forgotten. Yet it is no bad wisdom to remember that the day of sickness will probably come some time to us all; and to lay in stores of potential interest and cheerfulness against that day is a not unworthy use of power.

Certain it is that this greater diversity of small, unexciting, unfatiguing occupations enables women to bear a tedious illness with comparative patience, and helps to keep them more cheerful than men.

But when the time shall have come for the perfect development of the androgynous creature, who is as yet only in the pupal state of her existence, women will have lost these two great helps. Workers outside the home like their husbands and brothers, like them they will fume and fret when they are prevented from following their bread-winning avocations; calculations of the actual money loss they are sustaining coming in to aggravate their bodily pains. And, as the needle is looked on as one of the many symbols of feminine degradation, in the good time coming there will be none of that pretty trifling with silks and ribbons which may be very absurd by the side of important work, but which is invaluable as an invalid's pastime. Consequently, what with the anguish of knowing that her profession is neglected, and what with the unenlivened tedium of her days, sickness will be a formidable thing to women of the androgynous type--and to the men belonging to them.

Again, care and tact are required to rob sickness of its more painful features, and to render it not too distressing to the home companions.

A real woman, with her instincts properly developed--among them the instinct of admiration--knows how to render even invalidism beautiful; and indeed, with her power of improving occasions, she is never more charming than as an invalid or a convalescent. There is a certain refined beauty about her more seductive than the robuster bloom of health. Her whole being seems purified. The coa.r.s.er elements of humanity are obscured, pa.s.sions are at rest, and all those fretful, anxious strivings, which probably afflict her when in the full swing of society, are put away as if they had never been. She is forced to let life glide, and her own mind follows the course of the quieter flow. She knows too how to make herself bewitching by the art which is not artifice so much as the highest point to which her natural excellences can be brought. If the radiance of health has gone, she has the sweeter, subtler loveliness of fragility; if her diamonds are laid aside, and all that glory of dress which does so much for women is perforce abandoned, the long, loose folds of falling drapery, with their antique grace, perhaps suit her better, and the fresh flowers on her table may be more suggestive and delightful than artificial ones in her hair.

Many a drifting husband has been brought back to his first enthusiasm by the illness of a wife who knew how to turn evil things into good, and to extract a charm even out of suffering. It is a turn of the kaleidoscope; a recombination of the same elements but in a new pattern and with fresh loveliness; whereas the androgynous woman, with her business worries and her honest, if impolitic, self-surrender to hideous flannel wraps and all the uglinesses of a sick room crudely p.r.o.nounced, would have added a terror to disease which probably would have quenched his waning love for ever. For the androgynous woman despises every approach to coquetry, as she despises all the other insignia of feminine servitude. It is not part of her life's duties to make herself pleasing to men; and they must take her as they find her.

Where the true woman contrives a beauty and creates a grace out of her very misfortune, the androgynous holds to the doctrine of spades and the value of the unvarnished truth. Where the one gives a little thought to the most becoming colour of her ribbon or the best arrangement of her draperies, the other pushes the tangled locks off her face anyhow, and makes herself an amorphous bundle of brown and lemon colour. Her sole wish is to get the bad time over. How it would be best got over does not trouble her; and to beautify the inherently unlovely is beyond her skill to compa.s.s. Hence her hours of sickness go by in ugliness and idle fretting; while the true woman finds graceful work to do that enlivens their monotony, and in the continuance of her home duties loses the galling sense of loss from which the other suffers.

In sickness too, who but women can nurse? Men make good nurses enough out in the bush, where nothing better can be had; and a Californian 'pardner' is tender enough in his uncouth way to his mate stricken down with fever in the shanty, when he comes in at meal-times and administers quinine and brick tea with h.o.r.n.y hands bleeding from cuts and begrimed with mud. But this is not nursing in the woman's sense.

To be sure the strength of men makes them often of value about an invalid. They can lift and carry as women cannot; and the want of a few nights' sleep does not make them hysterical. Still they are nowhere as nurses, compared with women; and the best of them are not up to the thoughtful cares and pleasant attentions which, as medical men know, are half the battle in recovery. And this is work which suits women. It appeals to their love of power and tenderness combined; it gratifies the maternal instinct of protection and self-sacrifice; and it pleasantly reverses the usual order of things, and gives into their hands Hercules twirling a distaff the wrong way, and fettered by the length of his skirts.

The bread-winning wife knows nothing of all this. To her, sickness in her household would be only a degree less destructive than her own disablement, if she were called on to nurse. She would not be able to leave her office for such unremunerative employment as soothing her children's feverish hours or helping her husband over his. She would calculate, naturally enough, the difference of cost between hired help and her own earnings; and economy as well as inclination would decide the question. But the poor fellow left all day long to the questionable services of a hired nurse, or to the clumsy honesty of some domestic Phyllis less deft than faithful, would be a gainer by his wife's presence--granting that she was a real woman and not an androgyne--even if he lost the addition to their income which her work might bring in; as he would rather, when he came home from his work to her sick bed, find her patient and cheerful, making the best of things from the woman's point of view and with the woman's power of adaptation, than be met with anxious queries as to the progress of business; with doubts, fears, perplexities; the office dragged into the sick room, and unnecessary annoyance added to unavoidable pain.

There is a certain kind of woman, sweet always, who yet shows best when she is invalided. Cleared for a while from the social tangles which perplex and distress the sensitive, she is as if floated into a quiet corner where she has time to think and leisure to be her true self undisturbed; where she is able too, to give more to her friends, if less to the world at large than at other times. And she is always to be found. The invalid-couch is the rallying point of the household, and even the little children learn to regard it as a place of privilege dearer than the stately drawing-room of ordinary times. Her friends drop in, sure to find her at home and pleased by their coming; and her afternoon teas with her half-dozen chosen intimates have a character of their own, aesthetic and delightful; partly owing to the quiet and subdued tone that must perforce pervade them, partly to the unselfishness that reigns on all sides. Every one exerts himself to bring her things which may amuse her, and she is loaded with presents of a graceful kind--new books, early fruit, and a wealth of flowers to which even her poorest friend adds his bunch of violets, if nothing else. She is the precious child of her circle, and but for her innate sweetness would run a risk of being the spoilt one. Clever men come and talk to her, give her cause of thought, and knowledge to remember and be made glad by for all time; her lady friends keep her abreast of the outside doings of the world and their own especial coteries, contributing the dramatic element so dear to the feminine mind; every one tells her all that is afloat on the sea of society, but only all that is cheerful--no one brings her horrors, nor disturbs the frail grace of her repose with petty jealousies and tempers. Her atmosphere is pure and serene, and the dainty loveliness of her surroundings lends its charm to the rest.

To her husband she is even more beautiful than in the early days; and all men feel for her that chivalrous kind of tenderness and homage which the true woman alone excites. The womanly invalid, gentle, cheerful, full of interest for others, active in mind if prostrate in body, sympathetic and patient, is for the time the queen of her circle, loved and ministered to by all; and when she goes to Cannes or San Remo to escape the cruelty of the English winter, she carries with her a freight of good wishes and regrets, and leaves a blank which nothing can fill up until she returns with the summer roses to take her place once more as the popular woman of her society.

_ON A VISIT._

To most young people the social arrangement known as going on a visit to friends at a distance is one of the most charming things possible.

Novelty being to them the very breath of life, and hope and expectation their normal mental condition, the mere fact of change is in itself delightful; unless it happens to be something so hopelessly dull as a visit single-handed to an invalid grandmother, or the yearly probation of a girl of the period, when obliged to put herself under the charge of a wealthy maiden aunt with strict principles and no games of any kind allowed on the lawn. If the young ladies out on a visit are however, moderately cheerful, they can contrive to make amus.e.m.e.nt for themselves out of anything short of such sober-tinted extremes as these; and very often they effect more serious matters than mere amus.e.m.e.nt, and their visit brings them a love-affair or a marriage which changes the whole tenor of their lives. At the worst, it has shown them a new part of the country; given them new patterns of embroidery; new fashions of hairdressing; new songs and waltzes; and afforded an occasion for a large supply of pretty dresses--which last to most young women, or indeed to most women whether young or old, is a very effectual source of pleasure.

The great charm and excitement of going on a visit belongs naturally to the young of the middle cla.s.ses; among those of higher condition it is a different matter altogether. When people take their own servants with them and live in exactly the same style as at home, they merely change the furniture of their rooms and the view from the windows. The same kind of thing goes on at Lord A.'s as at Lord B.'s, in the Scottish Highlands or the Leicestershire wolds. The quality of the hunting or shooting may be different, but the whole manner of living is essentially repet.i.tion; and the dead level of civilization is not broken up by any very startling innovations anywhere. But among the middle cla.s.ses there is greater variety; and the country clergyman's daughter who goes on a visit to the London barrister's family, plunges into a manner of life totally different from that of her own home; the personal habits of town and country still remaining quite distinct, and the possibilities of action being on two different plans altogether.

A London-bred woman goes down to the country on a visit to a hale, hearty Hessian, her former school-fellow, who tucks up her woollen gown midway to her knees, wears stout boots of masculine appearance, and goes quite comfortably through mud and mire, across ploughed field and undrained farmyards--taking cramped stiles and five-barred gates in her way as obstacles of no more moment than was the mud or the mire. Long years of use to this unfastidious mode of existence have blinded her to the perception that a woman, without being an invalid, may yet be unable to do all that is so easy to her. So the London lady is taken for a walk, say of five or six miles, which to the vigorous Hessian is a mere unsatisfying stroll, to be counted no more as serious exercise than she would count a spoonful of _vol-au-vent_ as serious eating. To be sure the walk includes a few muddy corners and the like, and Bond Street boots do not bear the strain of stiff clay clods too well; neither is a new gown of the fashionable colour improved by being dragged through furze bushes and bracken, and brushed against the wet heads of field cabbages.

Moreover, crossing meadows tenanted by cattle that toss their heads and look--and looking, in horned cattle, is a great offence to our town-bred woman--is a service of peril which alone would take all the strength out of her nerves, and all the pleasure out of her walk; but the hostess cannot imagine feelings which she herself does not share, and the London lady is of course credited with courage, because to doubt it would be to cast a slur on her whole moral character. The Hessian minds the beasts no more than so many tree-stumps, but her friend sees a raging bull in every milky mother that stares at her as she pa.s.ses, and thinks something dreadful is going to happen because the flies make the heifers swish their tails and stamp. Then the dogs bark furiously as they rush out of farmsteads and cottages; and the newly dressed fields are not pleasant to cross nor skirt. The visitor cares little for wild flowers, less for birds, and all trees are pretty much alike to her; and this long rude walk, accentuated with the true country emphasis, has been too much for her. Her host wonders at her evening la.s.situde and low spirits, and fears that she finds it dull; and the robust hostess anathematizes the demoralizing effects of Kensington, and scornfully contrasts her present friend with her past, when they were both schoolgirls together and on a par in strength and endurance. 'She was like other people then,' says the well-trained Hessian who has kept herself in condition by daily exercise of a severe character; 'and now see what a poor creature she is! She can do nothing but work at embroidery and crouch shivering over the fire.'

Sometimes however, it happens the other way, and the lady guest, even though a Londoner, is the stronger of the two. The wife has been broken down by family cares and the one inevitable child too many; the guest comes fresh, unworn, unmarried, still young. The wife seldom goes beyond the garden, never further than the village, and is knocked up if she has done two miles; the guest can manage her six or eight without fatigue. Hence she naturally becomes the husband's walking companion during her visit, to his frank delight and as frank regrets that his wife cannot do as much. And the wife, though good-breeding and natural kindness prevent her objecting to these long walks, finds them hard lines all things considered. Most probably she bitterly regrets having invited her former friend, and mentally resolves never to ask her again. She wanted her as a little amus.e.m.e.nt and relaxation for herself. Her health is delicate and her life dull, and she thought a female friend in the house would cheer her up and be a help. But when she finds that she has invited one who, without in the least intending it and only by the force of circ.u.mstances, sets her in unfavourable contrast with her husband, we may be sure that it will not take much argument to convince her that asking friends on a visit is a ridiculous custom, and that people, especially young ladies fond of long walks, are best at their own homes.

In London there are two kinds of guests from the country; the insatiable, and the indifferent--those who wear out their hosts by their activity and those who oppress them by their supineness. The Londoner who has outlived all the excitement of the busy city life wonders at the energy and enthusiasm of his friend. Everything must be done, even to the Tower and the Whispering Gallery, Madame Tussaud's and the Agricultural Hall. There is not a second-rate trumpery trifle which has been in the shop windows for a year or more, that is not pored over, and if possible, bought; and among the inflictions of the host may be counted the crude taste of the guest, and the childish flinging away of money on things absolutely worthless. Or it may be that the guest has come up stored with many maxims of worldly wisdom and vague suspicion, and, determined not to be taken in, attempts to bargain in shops where a second price would be impossible, and where the host is personally known.

With guests of superabundant energy a quiet evening is out of the question. They go the round of all the theatres, and fill in the gaps with the opera and concerts. They have come up not to stay with you, but to see London; and they fulfil their intention liberally. Or they are indifferent and supine, and not to be amused, do what you will.

They think everything a bore, or they are nervous and not up to the mark. They beseech you not to ask any one to dinner, and not to take them with you to any reception. They are listless at the theatre and go to sleep at the opera. At the Royal Academy the only pictures they notice are those landscapes taken from their own neighbourhood, or perhaps one by a local artist known to them. All the finest works of the year fall flat; and before you have seen half the exhibition, they say they have had enough of it, and sit down, plaintively offering to wait till you have done, in the tone of a Christian martyr.

These are the people who are always complaining of the dirt and smoke of London and the stuffiness of the houses, as if they were personally injured and you personally responsible. They show a very decided scorn for all London produce, natural or artificial, and wonder how people can live in such a place. They are sure to deride the prevailing fashions, whatever they may be; while their own, of last season, are exaggerated and excessive; but they refuse to have the town touch laid on them during their stay, and heroically follow the millinery gospel of their local Worth, and measure you by themselves.

They show real animation only when they are going away, and begin to wonder how they shall find things at home, and whether Charles will meet them at the station or send William instead. But when they write to thank you for your hospitality, they tell you they never enjoyed anything so much in their lives; leaving you in a state of perplexity, as you remember their boredom, and peevish complainings, and evident relief in leaving, and compare your remembrance with the warm expressions of pleasure now before your eyes. All you can say is, that if they were pleased they took an odd way of showing it.

There are people rash enough to have other people's children on a visit; to take on themselves the responsibility of their health and safety, when the young guests are almost sure to fall ill by the change of diet and the unwonted amount of indulgence allowed, or to come into some trouble by the relaxing of due supervision and control.

They get a touch of gastric fever, or they tumble into the pond; and either bronchitis, or a fall from horseback, toppling over from a ladder, or coming to grief on the swing, or some such accident, is generally the result of an act which is either heroism or madness as one may be inclined to regard it. For of all the inconveniences attending visiting, those incidental to child-guests are the most distressing. Yet there are philanthropic friends who run these risks for the sake of giving pleasure to a few young people. Whether they deserve canonization for their kindness or censure for their rashness we leave an open question.

As for a certain disturbance in health, that generally comes to other than children from being on a visit. Hours and style of food are sure to be somewhat different from those of home; and the slight constraint of the life, and the feverishness which this induces, add to the disturbance. Occupations are interrupted both to the guest and the host; and some hosts think it necessary to make company for the guest, and some guests are heavy on hand. Some regard your house as a gaol and you as the gaoler, and are afraid to initiate an independent action or to call their souls their own; others treat you as a landlord, and behave as if you kept an inn, making a convenience of your household in the most unblushing manner. Some are fastidious, and covertly snub your wines, your table, and your whole arrangements; others embarra.s.s you by the fervour of their admiration, as if they had come out of a hovel and did not know the usages of civilized homes. Some intrude themselves into every small household matter that goes on before them, and offer advice that is neither wanted nor desired; and others will not commit themselves to the most innocent opinion, fearful lest they should be thought to interfere or take sides. Some of the women dress at the husband; some of the men flirt with the wife or make love to the daughters surrept.i.tiously; some loaf about or play billiards all day long till you are tired of the sound of their footsteps and the click of the b.a.l.l.s; other bury their heads in a book and are no better than mummies lounging back in easy chairs; some insist on going to the meet in a hard frost; others will shoot in a downpour; and others again waste your whole day over the chess-table, and will not stir out at all. Some are so sensitive and fidgety that they will not stay above a day or two, and are gone before you have got into the habit of seeing them, leaving you with the feeling of a whirlwind having pa.s.sed through your house; and others, when they come, stick, and you begin to despair of dislodging them.

On the other hand, there are houses where you feel that you would wear out your welcome after the third day, how long soever the distance you have come; and there are others where you would offend your hosts for life if you did not throw overboard every other duty and engagement to remain for as many weeks as they desire. In fact, paying visits and inviting guests are both risky matters, and need far more careful consideration than they generally receive. But when it happens that the thing is congenial on both sides, that the guest slips into a vacant place as it were, and neither bores nor is bored, then paying a visit is as delightful as the young imagination pictures it to be; and the peculiar closeness and sweetness of intimacy it engenders is one of the most enduring and charming circ.u.mstances incidental to friendship. This however, is rare and exceptional; as are most of the very good things of life.

_DRAWING-ROOM EPIPHYTES._

In every coterie we find certain stray damsels unattached; young ladies of personable appearance and showy accomplishments who go about the world alone, and whose parents, never seen, are living in some obscure lodgings where they pinch and screw to furnish their daughter's bravery. Some one or two great ladies of the set patronize these girls, take them about a good deal, and ask them to all their drums and at-homes. They are useful in their degree; very good-natured; always ready to fetch and carry in a confidential kind of way; to sing and play when they are asked--and they sing and play with almost professional skill; full of the small talk of the day, and not likely to bore their companions with untimely discussions on dangerous subjects, nor to startle them with enthusiasm about anything. They serve to fill a vacant place when wanted; and they look nice and keep up the ball so far as their own sphere extends. They are safe, too; and, though lively and amusing, are never known to retail gossip nor talk scandal in public.

Who are they? No one exactly knows. They are Miss A. and Miss B., and they have collaterals of respectable name and standing; cousins in Government offices; dead uncles of good military rank; perhaps a father, dead or alive, with a quite unexceptionable position; but you never see them with their natural belongings, and no one thinks of visiting them at their own homes. They are sure to have a mother in bad health, who never goes out and never sees any one; and if you should by chance come across her, you find a shabby, painful, peevish woman who seems at odds with life altogether, and who is as unlike her showy daughter as a russet wren is unlike a humming-bird. The drawing-room epiphyte introduces mamma, when necessary, with a creditable effort at indifference, not to say content, with her conditions; but if you can read signs, you know what she is feeling about that suit of rusty black, and how little she enjoys the rencounter.

Sometimes she has a brother, of whom she never speaks unless obliged, and of whose occupation and whereabouts, when asked, she gives only the vaguest account. He has an office in the City; or he has gone abroad; or he is in the navy and she forgets the name of his ship; but, whatever he is, you can get no clue more distinct than this. If you should chance to see him, you get a greater surprise than you had when you met the mother; and you wonder, with a deeper wonder, how such a sister should have sprung from the same stock as that which produced such a brother. Sometimes however, the brother is as presentable as the sister; in which case he probably follows much the same course as herself, and hangs on to the skirts of those of the Upper Ten who recognize him--preferring to idle away his life and energy as a well-dressed epiphyte of greatness rather than live the life of a man in a lower social sphere. But, as a rule, stray damsels have neither brothers nor sisters visible to the world, and only a widowed mother in the background, whose health is bad and who does not go out.

The ulterior object of the ladies who patronize these pretty epiphytes is to get them married; partly from personal kindness, partly from the pleasure all women have in bringing about a marriage that does not interfere with themselves. But they seldom accomplish this object. Who is to marry the epiphyte? The men of the society into which she has been brought from the outside have their own ambitions to realize.

They want money, or land, or a good family connexion, to make the sacrifice an equal bargain and to gild the yoke of matrimony with becoming splendour. And the drawing room epiphyte has nothing to offer as her contribution but a fine pair of eyes, a good-natured manner, and a pretty taste for music. To marry well among the society in which she finds herself is therefore almost impossible. And her tastes have been so far formed as to render a marriage into lower circ.u.mstances almost as impossible on the other side.

Besides, what could she do as the wife of a clergyman, say on three hundred a year, with a poor parish to look after and an increasing tribe of babies to feed and clothe? Her clear high notes, her splendid register, her brilliant touch, will not help her then; and the taste with which she makes up half-worn silk gowns, and transforms what was a rag into an ornament, will not do much towards finding the necessary boots and loaves which keep her sisters awake at night wondering how they are to be got. She has been taught nothing of the art of home life, if she has learnt much of that of the drawing-room. She cannot cook, nor make a little go a long way by the cunning of good management and a well-masked economy; she cannot do serviceable needlework, though she may be great in fancy work, and quite a genius in millinery; and the habit of having plenty of servants about her has destroyed the habit of turning her hand to anything like energetic self-help. Epiphyte as she is, penniless stray damsel more than half maintained by the kindness of her grand friends, she has to keep up the sham of appearances before those friends' domestics. And as ladyhood in England is chiefly measured by a woman's uselessness, and to do anything in the way of rational work would be a spot on her ermine, the poor epiphyte of the drawing-room, with mamma in rusty black in those shabby lodgings of theirs, learns in self-defence to practise all the foolish helplessness of her superiors; and, to retain the respect of the servants, loses her own.

What is she then but one of those misplaced beings who are neither of one sphere nor of another? She is not of the _grandes dames_ on her own account, yet she lives in their houses as one among them. She is not a woman who can make the best of things; who, notable and industrious, and by her clever contrivances of saving and subst.i.tution is able to order a home comfortably on next to nothing; and yet she has no solid claim to anything but the undercut of the middle cla.s.ses, and no right to expect more than the most ordinary marriage. She is nothing. Ashamed and unable to work, she has to accept gratuities which are not wages. Waiting on Providence and floated by her friends, she wanders though society ever on the look-out for chances. Each new acquaintance is a fresh hope, and every house that opens to her contains the potentiality of final success. To be met everywhere is the ultimate point of her ambition with respect to means; the end kept steadily, if fruitlessly, in view, is that satisfying settlement which shall take her out of the category of a hanger-on and give her a _locus standi_ of her own. But it does not come.

Year by year we meet the drawing-room epiphyte in the old haunts--at Brighton; at Ryde; at half-a-dozen good houses in London; on a visit to the friends who make much of her one day and snub her the next--but she does not 'go off.' She is pretty, she is agreeable, she is well dressed, she is accomplished; but she does not find the husband for whom all this is offered as the equivalent. Year by year she grows fatter or thinner as her const.i.tution expands into obesity or shrivels into leanness; the lines about her fine eyes deepen; the powder is a little thicker on her cheeks; and there are more than shrewd suspicions of a touch of rouge or of antimony, with a judicious application of patent hair-restorer to lift up the faded tints.

Fighting desperately with that old enemy Time, she disputes line by line the tribute he claims; and succeeds so far as to continue a good make-up for a year or two after other women of her own age have given in and consented to look their years. But the drawing-room epiphyte is nothing if she is not young--which is synonymous with power to interest and amuse. Her friends, the great ladies who hold drawing-rooms and gather society in shoals, want points of colour in their rooms as well as serviceable foils. The apple-pie that was all made of quinces was a failure, wanting the homely _couche_ from which the savour of the more fragrant fruit might be thrown up. On the other hand there are social meetings which are like apple-pies without any quince at all; and then the epiphyte is invaluable, and her music worth as much in its degree as if she were a prima donna, each of whose notes ranked as gold. So that when she ceases to be young, when she loses her high notes and has gout in her fingers, she fails in her only _raison d'etre_, and her occupation is gone. Hence her hard struggles with the old enemy, and her half-heroic, half-tragic determination not to give in while a shred of force remains.

On the day when she collapses into an old woman she is lost. She has nothing for it then but to withdraw from the brilliant drawing-rooms she has so long haunted into dingy lodgings in a back street, and live as her mother lived before her. Forgotten by the world which she has spent her life in waiting on, she has leisure to reflect on the relative values of things, and to lament, as she probably will, that she gave living grain for gilded husks; that she exchanged the realities of love and home, which might have been hers had she been contented to accept them on a lower social scale, for the barren pleasures of the day and the delusive hope of marrying well in a sphere where she had no solid foothold. She had her choice, like others; but she chose to throw for high stakes at heavy odds, and in so doing let slip what she originally held. The bird in the hand might have been of a homely kind enough; still, it was always the bird; while the two golden pheasants in the bush flew away unsalted, and left her only their shadows to run after.

On the whole then, we incline to the belief that the drawing-room epiphyte is a mistake, and that those stray damsels who wander about society unattended by any natural protector and always more or less in the character of adventuresses, would do better to keep to the sphere determined by parental circ.u.mstances than to let themselves be taken into one which does not belong to them and which they cannot hold.

And furthermore it seems to us that, irrespective of its present instability and future fruitlessness, the position of a drawing-room epiphyte is one which no woman of sense would accept, and to which no woman of spirit would submit.

_THE EPICENE s.e.x._

There has always been in the world a kind of women whom one scarcely knows how to cla.s.sify as to s.e.x; men by their instincts, women by their form, but neither men nor women as we regard either in the ideal. In early times they were divided into two cla.s.ses; the Amazons who, donning helmet and cuira.s.s, went to the wars that they might be with their lovers, or perhaps only for an innate liking for rough work; and the tribe of ancient women, so withered and so wild, who should be women yet whose beards forbade men so to account them, and for whom public opinion usually closed the controversy by declaring that they were witches--that is, creatures so unlike the rightful woman of nature that only the devil himself was supposed to be answerable for them. These particular manifestations have long since pa.s.sed away, and we have nowadays neither Amazons learning the goose-step in our barrack-yards, nor witches brewing h.e.l.l-broth on Scottish moors; but we have the Epicene s.e.x all the same--women who would defy the acutest social Cuvier among us to cla.s.sify, but who are growing daily into more importance and making continually fresh strides in their unwholesome way.

Possessed by a restless discontent with their appointed work, and fired with a mad desire to dabble in all things unseemly, which they call ambition; blasphemous to the sweetest virtues of their s.e.x, which until now have been accounted both their own pride and the safeguard of society; holding it no honour to be reticent, unselfish, patient, obedient, but swaggering to the front, ready to try conclusions in aggression, in selfishness, in insolent disregard of duty, in cynical abas.e.m.e.nt of modesty, with the hardest and least estimable of the men they emulate;--these women of the doubtful gender have managed to drop all their own special graces while unable to gather up any of the more valuable virtues of men. They are no more philosophical than the most inconsequent sister who judges all things according to her feelings, and commends or condemns principles as she happens to like or dislike the persons advocating them; and they are as hysterical and intemperate in their political cries as if the whole world wagged by impulse only. They are no more magnanimous under rebuke than the stanchest advocate of the sacredness of s.e.x, but resent all hostile criticism as pa.s.sionately, and from grounds as merely personal, as if they were still shrouded from public blame by the safety of their privacy; and they are as little useful in their blatant energy as when they spent their days in working monstrous patterns in crude-coloured wools, or found spiritual satisfaction in cutting holes in strips of calico to sew up again with a new st.i.tch. They have committed the mistake of abandoning such work as they can do well, while trying to manipulate things which they touch only to spoil; they have ceased to be women and not learnt to be men; they have thrown aside beauty and not put on strength.

The latest development of the impulses which animate the epicene s.e.x has taken its expression in after-dinner oratory. If we were as malicious to women as those whose follies we rebuke would have the world believe, we should encourage them to fight it out with womanly modesty and the world's esteem on this line. Their worst enemies could not wish to see them inflict on themselves a greater annoyance than the obligation of getting on their legs after the cheese has been removed, to turn on a stream of verbal insipidity for a quarter of an hour at a stretch. Only men who have something to say on the subject that may be on hand, and so are glad of every opportunity for elucidation or advocacy, or men who are eaten up with vanity, take pleasure in speechifying after dinner. Its uselessness is apparent; its mock hilarity is ghastly; even at political 'banquets,' when words are supposed to have some deep meaning, we get very little substance in it; while all the funny part of the business is the dreariest comedy, the unreality of which brings it close to tragedy.

If anything were wanting to show how much vanity prompts a certain cla.s.s of women in their ways and works, and how tremendous is their pa.s.sion for notoriety and personal display, it would be this a.s.sumption of the functions of the post-prandial orator. Indeed they have taken greatly of late to public speaking all round; and some among them seem only easy when they are standing before a crowd, to be admired if they are pretty, applauded if they are pert, and, in any case, the centre of attraction for the moment. We do not look forward with pleasure to the time when ladies will rise after their champagne and port, with flushed cheeks and eyes more bright than beautiful, steadying themselves adroitly against the back of their chairs, and rolling out either those interminable periods with no nominatives and no climax under which we have all so often suffered, or spasmodically jerking forth a few unconnected sentences of which the sole merit is their brevity. In the beginning of things, when the wedge has to be introduced, only the best of its kind puts itself forward; and doubtless the ladies who have already varied the usual dull routine of after-dinner oratory by their livelier utterances have done the thing comparatively well, and avoided a breakdown; but we own that we tremble at the thought of the flood of feminine eloquence which will be let loose if the fashion spreads.

Fancy the heavy British matron rearing her ample shoulders above the board, as she lays down the law on the duties of men towards women--especially sons-in-law--and the advantage to all concerned if wives are liberally dealt with in the matter of housekeeping money, and let to go their own way without marital hindrance. Or think of the woman's-rights woman, with her hybrid costume and her hard face, showing society how it can be saved from destruction only by throwing the balance of power into the hands of women--by the n.o.bler and brighter instincts of the oppressed s.e.x swamping that rude, rough, masculine element which has so long mismanaged matters. Or even think of the coquettish and alluring little woman getting up before a crowd of men and firing off the neatest and smartest park of verbal artillery possible, every shot of which tells and is applauded to the echo. How will men take it all? For ourselves, having too sincere a respect for women as they ought to be, and as nature meant them to be, we do not wish to see them turned into social buffoons, the mark for jeering comments and angry hisses when what they say displeases their hearers, told to 'sit down,' and 'shut up,' with entreaties to some strong man to 'take them out of that and carry them home to the nursery,' by a hundred voices roughened with drink and shouting. But if women expect that hostile feelings and opinions will be tamed or altogether suppressed in their honour because they choose to thrust themselves where they have no business, they will find out their mistake, perhaps when too late. If they abandon their safe cover and come out into the open, they must look to be hit like the rest. We cannot too often repeat that if they will mingle in the specialities of men's lives, they must put up with men's treatment and not cry out when they are struck home. In deference to them plain-speaking has been banished from the drawing rooms of society; but it is too much to expect men to sit in their own places under heavy boredom or fatuous gabble without wincing; and it is childish to ask us to make a free-gift of our truth and time to women who outrage one and waste the other. On the other hand the cheers which would follow if they hit the humour of the hour, or if, being specially pretty or specially smart, they afforded so much more than the ordinary excitement to the guests, would to our minds be just as offensive as the rougher truth, and perhaps more so. The leering approbation of men never over-nice in thought and now heated with wine, such as are always to be found at public dinners, is an infliction from which we should have imagined any woman with purity or self-respect would have shrunk with shame and dismay. But women who take to after-dinner speeches cannot be either nervous or fastidious.

Perhaps it is expecting too much of women of this kind if we ask them to consider themselves in relation to men's liking. They profess to despise the masculine animal they are so fond of imitating, and to be careless of his liking; holding it a matter of supreme indifference whether they are to his taste or not. But it may be as well to say plainly that the disgust which we may presume the normal healthy woman feels for men who paint and pad and wear stays and work Berlin work--men who give their minds to chignons and costumes; who spy after their maids' love-letters, and watch their boys as cats watch mice--men who occupy themselves with domestic details they should know nothing about; who look after the baby's pap-boat and the cinders in the dust-heap, and can call the various articles of household linen by their proper names--the disgust which the womanly woman feels for them is exactly that which the manly man feels for the epicene s.e.x.

Hard, unblushing, unloving women whose ideal of happiness lies in swagger and notoriety; who hate home life and despise home virtues; who have no tender regard for men and no instinctive love for children; who despise the modesty of s.e.x as they deny its natural fitness--these women have worse than no charm for men, and their place in the human family seems altogether a mistake. If there were any special work which they could do better than manly men or feminine women, we could understand their economic uses, and accept them as eminently unlovely outgrowths of a natural law, but at least as necessary and natural. But they are not wanted. They simply disgust men and mislead women; and those women whom they do not mislead in their own they often influence too strongly in the other direction by way of reaction, rendering them sickly in their sweetness, and weak rather than womanly. If the interlacing margins of certain things are lovely, as colours which blend together are more harmonious than those which are crudely distinct, it is not so with the interlacing margin of s.e.x. Let men be men, and women women, sharply, unmistakably defined; but to have an ambiguous s.e.x which is neither the one nor the other, possessing the coa.r.s.er pa.s.sions and instincts of men without their strength or better judgment, and the position and privileges of women without their tenderness, their sense of duty, or their modesty, is a state of things that we should like to see abolished by public opinion, which alone can touch it.