CHAPTER XXXV

WHAT IS A PERFECT LADY?

'Am I the man as wants a gentleman to drive him?'--How can you tell a lady?--A lady is a woman who adds to the virtues of a woman the qualities of a gentleman.

In a clever article, Lady Violet Greville recently asked, 'What is a lady?'

A friend of mine was once asked in New York by a coachman if he was 'the man as wanted a gentleman to drive him.'

I was myself told once by a negro hotel-porter, whom I had asked a question about some baggage of mine, to apply 'to that gen'l'man over there'--another negro porter.

A lady friend of mine who visits the poor of her district once called at a tenement house to inquire after a poor woman who was ill. The woman who answered the door shouted to someone upstairs: 'Will you tell the lady on the second floor that a young person from the district has called to see her?'

A lady acquaintance, who once happened to be alone in her home with a maid who was ill, out of consideration for that girl, went herself to open the door to a friend she had seen go up the steps of her house, so as to save the maid the trouble of coming upstairs. The following day that maid told a servant next door that 'her mistress was no lady,' as she answered her door herself.

'What is a lady?' asks Lady Violet Greville.

Well, it is hard to tell in these democratic days, when every class strives to ape the others above, when all people are equal to their superiors and superior to their equals.

With the modern extravagance in dress, the boisterous hats, the outrageously _decollete_ dresses in restaurants and other public places, the cigarette-smoking, the card-playing for high stakes, and what not, I shall feel inclined to answer: 'You can tell a lady by the efforts she makes to be taken for--anything but a lady.'

Every class of society has its own definition of a lady. To the inhabitants of the slums it is a woman who stops her nose when in contact with them; to servants, it is one who does not do a stroke of work in her house, pays their wages regularly, throws at them her left-off clothes, and treats them like dirt; to tradespeople, it is one who pays cash for what she buys; for dressmakers and milliners, it is a woman who never bargains, and is known never to wear her gowns and hats more than half a dozen times.

What is that new supreme desire to pass for a lady?

'It proceeds purely,' said Lady Violet Greville, 'from a wish to imitate; it is vulgarity pure and simple.

'It is the aspiration after gentility, the longing to appear what we are not, the desire of the fly for the dinner-lamp.

'It is the natural consequence of the religion of the Anglo-Saxon race--make-believe.

'A real lady's existence,' continues her ladyship, 'seems to outsiders to be all sweetness, and passed in a land of milk and honey; whereas, in reality, could her poor, crawling admirers realize it, the modern lady's life is a compound of hard work, exhausting excitement, anxious ease, and infinite disillusion. To begin with, she is often poorer than her prosperous neighbour, compelled to practise petty and galling economies, travel second class, wear cleaned gloves, and spend unpleasant moments in street-cars and omnibuses. It is the vulgar _nouveaux riches_ who own the carriages, the horses, the jewels, and the money.'

Yet the vulgar rich may be as lavish as they please, may throw gold out of the windows, give a small fortune for their horses and carriages, they have not enough money to buy what that lady possesses, her delicacy and refinement. Even their servants know that, for they can take the measure of the mushroom nobility to a T.

In a few years more, no doubt, the word 'lady,' entirely divested of the original meaning, far away buried in the mists of time, will merely be the equivalent of the feminine gender, the female of the male, and then the gentler bred and wiser of the sex will exult in bravely calling themselves women. And they will be right. 'A perfect woman' sounds to my ears far more sweetly than 'a perfect lady.' There is no misunderstanding about the former. 'I am not an angel,' says an _ingenue_ to her _fiance_ in some French play, the name of which now escapes me; 'don't expect too much from me. I am only a woman.' A woman--only a woman. Heavens! that is good enough for anybody!

Lady Violet Greville concludes her clever article by a beautiful definition of a lady:

'The real lady settles her debts, does not forget her liabilities, would as soon cheat as commit murder, and actually considers an engagement a binding duty. She has a soft voice and a pleasant manner; she is the daughter of evolution and the survival of the fittest. If she has nerves, she does not show them. She has courage of the finest sort, the courage of her opinions and the moral courage to deny herself.'

I feel almost inclined to draw myself up, and say of the real lady: 'In short, she possesses all the qualities that make up a gentleman.'

Tell me, ladies, if this is not just like a man.