Part 2
“Why don’t you ask me why I am saying this to you?”
“Because I know, and because it is so much more amusing to have you say it unassisted.”
“Now, do you know that I should have expected to find you superior to a proclivity so purely feminine as that. To make him say things unassisted! From the dawn of time woman has delighted to do that.”
There was a haze of thought in her eyes. “I dare say you never have stopped to think that when he is assisted he says so much more than he means.”
“I thought you were going to say, ‘than he ought to.’”
“The greater includes the less. When he says a little that he doesn’t mean he says a great deal more than he ought to.”
“Perhaps he always will say much that he shouldn’t, anyway. But admitting that you have the right to mystify him, and then not to help him, does it seem to you precisely fair that girls who neither go into the marrying game, nor stay out of it, should—”
“Flirt as much as they do—I want to save you the trouble of finding an inoffensive phrase.”
“Perhaps I wasn’t going to be inoffensive. And I might not have chosen the word ‘flirt.’ Flirt doesn’t exactly express the idea. I shouldn’t wish to seem as if I were hunting about for a new title for an old crime,—”
“Crime? You will be quite solemn in a moment. Did you come over here to scold me?”
“I thought this was a talk game. A talk game couldn’t have a motive, could it?”
“Why, yes. It is like a Wagnerian composition. We might have encountered the Didactic Motive.”
“Now you are scolding me. I insist that I am merely the Interested Spectator. Maybe I am a sort of Walking Gentleman in the cast, who, with every wish not to be impertinent, ventures a timid and respectful word with the leading lady in the wings.”
“Should you think the Walking Gentleman had a right to quarrel with the leading lady as to her method of reading the lines?”
“No; but surely he might ask her, humbly, and in a spirit of honest inquiry, what she thought the author meant and whether, to her, the play seemed consistent. 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.”
“Then you have come over here with a view to classifying me?”
“Suppose I had so definite a hope?”
“I might help you.”
“What are you, please?”
“I am the Left-Over Girl.”
“I don’t wish to be ungracious, but that does not help me much. Who or what has left you over?”
“Circumstances. In the course of the great readjustment I am left out, lost in the shuffle, if you like.” This idea seemed to please her. “Marriage is like any other game, isn’t it? He calls her bluff—”
“Don’t!” I protested. “These card game allusions perplex me as much as the paradox which I have encountered in my travels this year, that poker is popular in New England and dominoes in Texas.”
“But somebody told me that they play a very wicked kind of dominoes in Texas, and I know that they play a very moral kind of poker in New England.”
“I am afraid you play poker.”
“Like Mistress Muslin, I love cards. And you know there are some people who never have good hands. Doesn’t that prove that the word ‘chance’ has a deep and dark meaning? There is fate behind chance. I never had a good hand but once.”
“In which game?”
“Oh, in the card game. And I didn’t win, for the old reason—my partner was so stupid. I could have withered him. But he was an unwitherable man.”
“I wish that you would tell me something more about this left-over situation. Not that I think you can know very much about it yet. You cannot have been left over very long, and asking you about your left-overness may be almost as premature as intercepting the newly arrived European traveller in New York Bay and asking him how he likes America.”
“I suppose you wish to ask me how it feels to be left over.”
“No, I haven’t got so far as that. As you have taken part, as it were, in the circumstances which have left you over, I should like to find out if I could, that is to say, if you felt that you could tell me, which qualities in you tended to bring about this result. I feel quite certain that you are not a born old maid. The born old maid is one of nature’s whimsicalities that are not hard to read. Even when she is married, one may easily recognize her. What interests me is the subtle differentiation in those among the unmarried who never will be old maids, which has produced their left-overness. For the life of me I can’t see why you should be left over, either subjectively or objectively. Is it a gnawing prejudice, or a sense of humor, that has made you leave yourself over?”
“Might not those things characterize an old maid?”
“They might, but an old maid would be an old maid without regard to the possession of any such particular qualities. The old maid instinct is another matter. We are talking now about this different and evolved modern tendency.”
“Suppose I were to say that marriage simply is not in my line. What should you say that that indicated? Might not an old maid say that?”
“She might say it and she does say it, which may indicate how indefinite it is. In the interest of social science I really should like to know what you think you mean by that. Of course questions upon so serious a matter necessarily seem a trifle brutal.”
“Don’t apologize, Mr. Scientist. I suspect that the trouble with me is that I can’t get up a personal interest in marriage. I have no prejudice against it as an institution, or as a—state of mind. I am not even single because I am cautious. No one has preached to me the philosophy of disenchantment. 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 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. Yet I don’t feel that I have the least instinctive aversion to marriage. Do you suppose that if I were a born old maid I should be conscious of the instinctive removal?”
“Probably not. Do you hear that music in the hotel parlor that has supplied a plaintive accompaniment to our talk?”
“That is Miss—hush! If ever there was an old maid born—”
“Yes, and that woman has dreamed of marriage from her girlhood. Wasn’t it Charles Lamb who said with regard to music that he was sentimentally disposed to harmony but applicably was incapable of a tune? Poetry and the old maid instinct have battled in that woman for forty years. But we are slipping from science into gossip. Shouldn’t she answer your question?”
“I don’t know. Who can say that she isn’t conscious of the instinct? Lamb knew that he couldn’t actually make a tune. It was Lamb, wasn’t it, who tried all his life to like Scotsmen? And when he gave up at the end he was so sweet about it. He couldn’t like them, but he didn’t have a bit of additional resentment because he had failed. Some people hate—with interest from the date of prejudice. Now I have been trying for—quite a few years to like marriage,—personally, you know,—and if I fail I don’t expect to place any interest charges against the institution.”
“And on the other hand, if you succeed, you mustn’t expect marriage to pay you too heavily on the investment.”
“I’m afraid I should be more likely to do that than the other. I suppose that shows that I am not a philosopher. If I ever marry—but how ridiculous that sounds! You would think I was talking about—any other career.”
“Oh, if I were selling stock in matrimony, I should consider you quite a hopeful case. But I’ll wager that many another man has thought the same thing. And naturally you have not been seriously conscious of the phases of yourself that have made you seem like a hopeful case to them. I was reading the other day in a new Franklin biography an advertisement written by Franklin and appearing in his paper. It concerned certain missing books of his, and was headed: ‘Lent and Forgot to Whom,’ Ah! my dear, it is so with many of you women: you lend and forget to whom. But the men—”
“What a dreadfully unfortunate analogy! If they keep that which does not belong to them, am I to blame? 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? You see what an adroit, hovering style he has? I know just the sort of thing he is saying to that white duckling. He is one of the men who forget to whom. He is a Cynic-Maker.”
We watched them silently as they sauntered up the path.
“Yes,” I said, “that is the way the great tangle begins. A nice girl meets your Cynic-Maker, finds that he forgets to whom, from which she concludes that all men are a mockery. Then some honest young fellow meets her, revolts at her crude, newly fledged cynicism, which an older or a less honest man might have penetrated in a moment, decides that all women are depraved, and there you are with all the elements of a social tragedy. We may say that the arch-mischief-maker is the man who creates the cynic; yet we should, perhaps, inquire whether any new conditions are producing him.”
“He is as old as lying,” she said quietly, her eyes following him up the steps.
“The one comfort,” I added, “is that he probably does not succeed in making cynics so easily as in an earlier state of society.”
“You mean that girls are more skeptical?”
“I mean that girls have more freedom, more experience, more information, more opportunities for comparison, and that the Cynic-Maker, to succeed, has to be vastly cleverer than he used to be.”
“I believe I shall join you in that optimism, though I am inclined to think that by an operation of natural selection he is vastly cleverer than he used to be.”
The Cynic-Maker sat down beside the white duckling at the other end of the veranda.
“Witness,” I said, “the grotesque appositions of life: The Cynic-Maker and the Victim at one end of the stage, and the Spectator with the Left-Over Girl at the Other. Surely we have here some very important elements of a social allegory.”
“And in spite of everything,” mused the Left-Over Girl, “I was going to say just now that I thought marriage was more popular than ever.”
“What makes you think that—I mean in view of the statistics, in view of the census of the unmarried?”
“You must not insist upon participation only as indicating popularity. Take the instance of golf, which few people actually play, but which is _the_ game all the same. I mean that in proportion to the number who do not marry there is less affirmative objection to marriage than in the past.”
“I wish I knew how you make that out. But I am going to take this much from it, and you will correct me if I am wrong: Women are less likely to marry than formerly; but they are also less certain not to marry.”
“Would it cheer you any to believe that?”
“I do not insist upon being cheered. But I should like to know. I am weak enough to want to be confirmed in a belief which I have tried to formulate. 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.”
“And thou, Brutus!—after I had lifted the veil! I am very magnanimous. I play a talk game with you, and let you ask me impossible questions, label myself for you, uncover my dearest theories, deal mercifully with your syllogizing, and now I agree to your formula,—yes, and I take off my brown paper. What more could mortal woman do?”
“Nothing more,” I said, staring at the lettering on the book, “nothing more, except tell me why on earth you are reading ‘Emma’?”
She gave a little chuckle and shook her head. “That,” she said, “is the one thing you have asked that I can not answer.”
III
WITH A GYM GIRL
There had been some mistake about the time, and she was there an hour ahead of the class, a circumstance which I had not the conscience to resent, for she said I might stay until the class came. Meanwhile we sat in the big, cool gymnasium, into which fell patches of spring sunlight that painted here the shining floor, and there striped the dangling lines of rope, falling finally into whimsical arabesques on the dumb-bell rack. It was a co-educational sort of gymnasium, as one might guess from the punching-bag and other devices, classes of men and women, boys and girls, alternating in possession, under the discipline of an academy.
She herself wore a dark serge gym suit, that fascinating hybrid of skirt and bloomer, which unites the charm of drapery with the effect of the girded uniform. Sitting there thus well-dressed, lithe, poised, sufficient, with light in her eyes and blood in her lips, she presented a pleasing spectacle. Something in her association with all the paraphernalia of the vaulted gymnasium struck me as symbolizing the situation of her sex in the modern world. She seemed only prophetically adjusted to it all, and yet one could not but have the feeling that she would always know just what to leave alone.
For some reason that did not appear at the moment, she was not merely the feminine version of the athlete. She was something differing from that, doubtless something better. I could not think of her as promoting athletics. The athletics seemed to be promoting her. The ultimate thing was not a system, a day, an hour, an event. The ultimate thing was herself. The theory of athletics from a man’s viewpoint is a pretty affair, and unquestionably it includes the notion of a finer physical manhood for us all, directly in the participants, by reflection in the rest of us. Even football, the _reductio ad absurdum_ of inter-personal conflict, is presumed and I believe reasonably, to have a tonic influence on the physical development of the race, although there is no country in the world where, in the habit of daily life, it is more unsafe than in this for one man to shoulder another. But in feminine athletics so far as these have gone, there yet appears much less of the idea of prospective conflict. It may be that this is to come again later. A bunch of girls in a hand-ball game introduces a lively element of organized contest. But it scarcely looks as if the girl runner of the Greek games was likely to be repeated.
“I suppose you think all this is very absurd,” said the Gym Girl, tapping the floor with her slipper. “Sometimes I myself think it is. But I like it; I like it well enough not to care what any one thinks, and besides, I am supported by the moments when I think it isn’t a bit absurd.”
“Which moment is this?”
“I should find it hard to say. Until I know what you think about it, I feel defensive about the gym. Generally speaking, I feel rather cordial toward it to-day.”
“Then please feel cordial toward me, too, for I like the gym and the idea the gym represents.”
“What idea does the gym represent?” she asked in a tone of challenge.
“Now that is scarcely hospitable. Moreover, I had saved up that to ask you. But I don’t mind committing myself, with the understanding that you are to supplement me in the matter. This gymnasium seems to me to stand for the idea of physical equilibrium. It means that you and the others are not willing to give up what the city seeks to force you to give up for the time. 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. They do not include the immensely important element of climbing, for example. The gymnasium ought to fill in the chinks. I suppose it does. Then it makes you like it. Perhaps that is one of the best things it does.”
“It does make me like it, because it makes me like myself. The gymnasium makes me feel good,—_good_, do you understand, not merely _well_.”
“We often have been told that if we all were well we all should be good.”
“I don’t suppose I am good enough to hurt, but it is nice to feel that way. Mind you, I don’t agree at all that women need the gymnasium any more than men do. I have three brothers, and I know some things. I know that the average man is just as much hampered by his clothes as the average woman. I really think he is hampered more, for he defers to his clothes more than a woman defers to hers. A woman’s management of her skirt at least gives her a certain amount of exercise, while a man’s horror of bagging his trousers at the knees has not a single physical compensation. It simply limits his movements.”
“But a woman’s skirt limits her movements.”
“I wouldn’t say that it limited them so much as it directed them.”
“Perhaps you will tell me why most women are or seem to be pigeon toed.”
“I can explain that. It is for the same reason that they waddle when they go up stairs. The reason is the skirt. I can illustrate by a diagram,” and she found a hoople and placed it on the floor. “That we shall say is Figure One. Now, I place here two dumb-bells. These we shall say are feet standing within the radius of the skirt. Now the point of freest action in stepping for the feet B and C obviously lies in the direction of A. Toward A the foot B can move in the longest line without striking the skirt. Hence in walking the tendency for one foot to follow the other in the direction of A and the centrifugal tendency of the toes. As women learn to wear shorter skirts or wear short skirts a greater proportion of the time the likelihood that they will be intoed will naturally decrease.”
“Very convincing!” I cried. “The intoed tendency is beautifully extenuated in a most logical way. Plainly it would be as foolish for a woman to walk with her toes out as it would be for a cavalryman to ride with his knees out.”
“Unless she were going up stairs.”
“Up stairs? Oh, I see. You are to explain the waddling. That will be an immense comfort to every man—I mean the explanation. So many of us have turned our faces away from the spectacle of a lovely creature who walked with a Delsartean lilt and seated herself with the inexpressible grace of a bird who has reached the chosen branch, mounting a flight of steps with the roll of a breathless duck.”
“Let us now take this hoople for Figure Two,” said the Gym Girl, with a serious effect. “The two feet, still represented by the dumb-bells, now seek not the point of least resistance but the point of most resistance. They do not wish to tread on the gown, which is likely to happen, even when it is slightly lifted, unless the knees assist in lifting the forward edge. This chalk mark extending to A and B will indicate by its variation from the circular line the direction in which the feet alternately move in the effort to keep the skirt free in front. Of course a woman who tries to go up stairs with her hands full, without holding her skirt, must waddle more than a woman who is able to let her hands help her feet.”
“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. I fancy that Greek and Roman women had some such untransmittable method of managing redundant drapery during those intervals when the use of beauty gave place to its twin, the beauty of use.”
“Yes, I think you will find that from the beginning of time woman has sought to combine garments in which she may be becomingly draped and in which she may move abroad. The Professor tells us that a trailing gown is an anachronism out of doors, save to those women who are carried—you know what I mean, in a carriage or something. We have heard that a great many times; but all the same, I suppose women will go on trying to make the gown they prefer to be seen in do service during the transits as well as during the pauses.”
“There is much transit about the modern woman.”
“I hope you find something to be glad of in that.”
“I do; but no man can help feeling that draperies are a great burden which no gallantry can lighten.”
“O yes, gallantry can! See that her packages are sent home—or carry them for her.”
“Understand me: I think that draperies held up in the right way by the right woman are an element of real picturesqueness in modern life. But sometimes they are not held up at all.”
“Yes, I know. Theoretically a lady does not let her dress drag in an unclean place. But actually there is a good deal of dragging. It is a pity, too, if you men are going to be disturbed by it. There should be consolation for you in the frequent gym suit—which you seldom see, because you are not often permitted to enjoy your present privileges—and in the more frequent bicycle suit. The bicycle has done in one decade what abstract dress reforming would never have accomplished. Sometimes I think that the most important inventions of the century are the bicycle and the shirt waist. Each has had an immensely important influence on the physical and economic situation of women. I have no doubt the bicycle will get full credit, but if no historian mentions the shirt waist the shirt waist will proclaim its own triumph.”
“I believe you have been writing a paper on that.”
“No, I am not a paper-writing girl. One thing I am sure of: The review of women’s dress during the century will surely dismiss the shirt-waist with a few lines.”
“I dare say. It will go unsung, like the plain, average, every-day woman, who is doing so much of the world’s work,—I mean, of course, except on the Woman’s Page. 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.”