Part 3

“When you say ‘backwards,’ I know that you don’t mean backwards in the sense in which an old lady or a very portly person of any age gets out backwards,—turning about, holding with both hands, and backing off. That was the way Ian Maclaren’s old lady tried to get off the underground train, wasn’t it? and was pulled up the steps at one station after another by men who thought that she was getting on? You mean getting off with the face to the rear, instead of with the face to the engine, the motor, or the horse.”

“That is what I do mean.”

“I had supposed that there was but one answer to that old question: Because they have not been trained by getting on and off vehicles while the vehicles are in motion. A person who gets on a vehicle while it is in motion learns at once that the forward handle is the only safe handle to hold either in getting on or getting off. The forward handle is the one that preserves your balance should the vehicle start while you are getting on or off.”

“Yes,” I said, “that is the old answer, too. But it does not answer enough. I have disproved its accuracy a score of times. I have seen women who knew better by precept, by example, and by experience get off backward, as if obeying some fatalistic impulse. The other day a woman who stepped off a car in my presence, firmly grasping the wrong handle, laughed and said, ‘There! that’s the wrong handle, but I can’t help it!’ That illustrates what I mean. She could not tell why she _had_ to take the wrong handle, which, if the car had been going in the other direction would have demanded the other hand. Your theory at best would only explain why women do not get off rightly. It does not explain why nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand get off wrongly. It would be well enough if the proportions were even, if the habit seemed like a matter of chance. But quite plainly it is not a matter of chance. There is a strange, and, as yet, unexplained impulse to which women yield when the moment of choice comes. Every day I see women get off the wrong way at real inconvenience. They are like Jerome K. Jerome’s stage villain who doesn’t want to be a villain, who is not profited by being a villain, but who, quite uncomplainingly, goes on being the villain in obedience to the unities. Once I thought I had grasped the thing, which you must know gave me a moment of superior comfort. A coach or a car, I said to myself, generally stops at a point beyond that at which the passenger really wishes to alight, as at the further curb, and in getting off and spurning the vehicle, as it were, the woman passenger, acting with primitive directness, turns her back upon it at the moment of alighting. But I have repeatedly seen women get off a trolley-car at a near corner when they had to turn about and walk in the direction the car was going, and they faced the rear of the car when they got off just as they do under all other circumstances. It is extraordinary. You must not think the inquiry trivial. It is not merely a question of a minor physical habit. There certainly is some momentous psychological significance under it all, something with a deep meaning if we only could get at it.”

“Perhaps this backwardness has something to do with woman’s confusion as to right and left.”

“Heavens!” I exclaimed. “I thought for an instant you were going to say right and wrong! The right and left confusion explains nothing, for in those directions in which people are confused as between right and left they are as likely to take one as the other. How could that explain why a woman uses her right hand when she should use her left, and her left when she should use her right?”

“I’m afraid it wouldn’t, unless you wished to fortify some theory of her natural perverseness, and I hope you don’t wish to be so trite. You shouldn’t hurry woman too much. See what physical agility she is displaying with the bicycle. She is unfolding wonderfully. You men are too impatient. I read an advertisement the other day in which I saw a tangible sign of this impatience. It was headed. ‘A Moustache in a Month.’ Surely that is wrong.”

“Yes, it is as wrong as the conditions indicated by a department store advertisement I read the other day which began: ‘Great Embroidery Excitement.’”

“O, I know we are all too intense. I understand that it is telling in our appearance. A scientific observer has been reminding us that we Americans have too much expression, and that the dull, stupid look in certain English faces, for instance, indicates reserve force, a force that is not constantly being wasted in expression. They say we even go to sleep with our expressions. My teacher says, ‘When you go to bed, unlock your face.’”

“Are teachers really bothering you about your expressions? Your teacher must be a woman.”

“She is, and—”

“I thought so. Only a woman—”

“Yes, I know. Our expressions are too lovely to be ruthlessly modified. I credit you with all that you could say. But you are not a bit practical. Our nerves are more important than our expressions. I guess you may count on us for expression enough when the occasion demands. What we want are healthy nerves behind the expressions.”

“I see; you are going in for that stupid look now.”

“If it becomes necessary.”

“You never will succeed.”

“Probably I don’t want you to hope we will. You know what I mean—”

“How can I help knowing? Do we hear anything else but relaxing? Those of you who are not relaxing tremendously are repenting of your outlines and straining to get thin.”

“Don’t you suppose there are great advantages in these readjustments? When a girl is very pretty she is pampered; when she is pampered she grows fat; when she grows fat she grows ugly; and so things are balanced.”

“Let me amend that,” I said. “When she gets fat she gets frightened, diets, and gets fatter. Then she gets a little angry, golfs, rides, swims, hustles, finds the secret, gets reasonably proper again and acquires the new charm that comes with the aroused energy and the humility of a threatened loss—or gain, as you may wish to put it. Nothing is more qualifying than the threatened adversity of fat. We all know women who would be simply insufferable if they were not a shade plumper than they care to be. I fancy that leanness induces a more private humility.”

“It is a more private defect. But this is all to be righted in the next century. Our new ideals are going to give us more of the English physique. Anyway, we are going to be more athletic, not merely in this gymnasium way, which is only a sign of good faith, but in a broader, more practical, more—shall I say final?—way. See what summer means to us now.”

“Well, it seems to mean a great many things.”

“It means everything that could make a gym unnecessary. It once meant very little, it seems to me; if we are to believe what our grandmothers tell us. Now it means as much to a girl as to her brother.”

“It doesn’t mean quite as much as it might if there were more brothers—there.”

“True. Our summer groups always make me think of college. We are not through seeing too much of one another when we graduate. Presently we are in clubs or gym classes, and, in the summer, man is an exceptional element.”

“And that is not good for him. It is not good for him to be in such a majority in the city nor in such a minority in the country. But I don’t see what we can do about it.”

“I suppose each sex will have to go on living out the problem for itself. That seems likely to keep both sexes busy.”

“It is keeping your sex busy.”

“You never can tell about us.”

“I admit that.”

“We have great larks over the profound things, and go to pieces—”

“Relaxing.”

She laughed, and got up in her easy, definite way. “You must go now,—not because you have been naughty, but because the class is coming.”

“That is a class decision. But I bow to your ruling, Miss Gym.”

IV

WITH A HEROINE

When I asked her what sort of heroine she was, she looked up with a laugh and said that she didn’t see how it was possible to say precisely until the end of the story.

“And yet,” I said, “one generally can make a good guess before the last chapter comes.”

“Then you may do that,” she rejoined.

“I dare say I might find out by the process of elimination. You are not a heroine because you are travelling alone from Los Angeles to Richmond?”

“No. In this age and country there isn’t a particle of heroism in that. Why, you remember that ‘a woman might travel from one end of Britain to the other with safety in Eadwine’s day.’”

“It is not because you are travelling in a bicycle suit?”

“No. There are no more heroics in clothes.”

“Perhaps you have been ordered home against your wishes, and are illustrating that pleasant miracle ‘fair looks and true obedience’?”

“No. I rather enjoy being obedient; and I am going of my own accord.”

“Then I have no doubt that your going out there had something heroic about it; or maybe—”

“Those are all wide of the mark. I hardly think you are likely to guess correctly.”

“Well,” I said, “there is one comfort: I can see precisely what sort of heroine you are—in appearance. That is a great start. Nowadays, we have to do a heap of guessing as to the embodied element in the heroines we read about. We all have prejudices, and it is nice to get rid of them at the beginning. I knew of a New England lady who was immensely disappointed in her new pastor because, as she said, she ‘never could abide a minister who was light complected.’”

“I am sorry to rob you of the privilege of fashioning the physical heroine after your own fancy. I always like to have at least a little of my own way in the matter of the hero. When he is described too circumstantially there is nothing left for me. You see I might object to the hero who was light complected.”

“O, I can see,” I said, “that you probably dote on these disembodied novels that deal entirely with emotions, that have been trying for a decade or two to get as far as possible from the Dickens Gentleman-with-the-White-Waistcoat point of view. For a long time it seems to have been considered vulgar in a literary sense to descend to the description of clothes—as if clothes were not of great importance in helping us to get at the character of a man—or a woman.”

“But we don’t need that help in a book, do we, when we have the author to tell us what is inside?”

“Yes, that is what those fellows will tell you. But is that really so? When we know what the character looks like—that is, what the author thinks the character looks like—do we not gain a definite and necessary impression beyond that which the author sets out to give?”

“Perhaps the author doesn’t want you to go wandering off that way. When he is so ready to tell you what is inside, what is the use of giving you material for any other impression?”

“Because the reader will have an impression of his own anyway, and the author owes him all the facts. Now, let us suppose that some one was to go on with a story about you, a mysterious young woman in a Pullman coach; can’t you see that it would be vastly more interesting to me because I could picture you easily as the story went on? Don’t you suppose that I should be more likely to be interested in your emotions because I had seen you than I should in seeing you because I had heard about your emotions?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it would depend. But if you are going back to old-fashioned romance what is the use of describing the heroine? She is always the same. Wait a moment.”

She picked up a book that lay beside her. It was “Monte Cristo.” I had lent it to her the day before when the train boy had nothing more that she wanted. I had seen her read three novels through in one day. Perhaps there was something malicious in this intrusion of a book that she couldn’t finish in a day. Now she was reading from “Monte Cristo”—

“‘A young and beautiful girl, with hair as black as jet, her eyes as velvety as the gazelles, was leaning with her back against the wainscot, rubbing in her slender fingers, modelled after the antique, a bunch of heath blossoms ...; her arms bare to the elbow, embrowned and resembling those of the Venus at Arles, ... and she tapped the earth with her pliant and well-formed foot.’ There you have it,—that is the formula. And wait—here is the other: ‘A more perfect specimen of manly beauty could scarcely be imagined.’ That is the formula for the hero. Do these delight you?”

“Yes; it is primitive, but I like it. I have enjoyed ‘Monte Cristo’ on this journey even for its faults. It is ultimate romance, and I think I like it much better than the ultimate in realism. I like the heroine to be pretty. Unless the author specifically denies it, I always believe that she _is_ pretty. You see I am hopelessly old-fashioned; and you are hopelessly modern. Probably you don’t care at all how the story comes out.”

“Oh, I am not so modern as that! I do care. What I like about realism is that you aren’t so sure how it will turn out. Doesn’t it always seem to you like a waste of time to make them all so miserable when they are to live happily ever after anyway?”

“It doesn’t seem to me any worse than making them happy with the certainty that they are going to be dismal by and by. I suppose I have a serious limitation somewhere, but I should rather see people painfully happy than amusingly miserable, which seems to be the dilemma in which you insist upon finding us all.”

“I am like one of those lawyers who delight in saying, ‘We don’t admit anything, Your Honor.’”

“Maybe you _are_ a lawyer,” I interposed, “and are a heroine because you refused a magnificent retainer for reasons of conscience?”

But she shook her head again. “I was going to say,” she went on, “that romance simply is too sentimental for me. What you would call the monotonous dead level isn’t so stupid as the antirealism critics like to make out. Take the present entirely commonplace incident. I meet you on a railway train. For my soul’s good, you feed me with romance, and exhibit a most entertaining curiosity. Now all that isn’t stupid, is it?”

“Thanks, gentle lady.”

“Then why may we not like in a book the sort of thing we enjoy in life?”

“But I should insist that all this is romance. You are a heroine, and if I am not a hero, I am playing leading man just now, which has great possibilities. We are being hurled through space at a speed of sixty miles an hour. By and by a dark-skinned person will loom at the door and say that dinner is ready in the dining car, and you will let me open all the doors for you to the third coach ahead; and we will eat, drink, and be merry at the parting of the ways, and you will twit me for my New York accent in the most musical dialect that ever was invented by the Anglo-Saxon race. Yet I do not know your name, and you do not know mine. We are two detached fragments of human society appositely placed in a Pullman section, impelled by the social instinct and chaperoned by a corporation. All the elements are modern. Can not you see the very essence of romance in the situation?”

“On the contrary it appears to me as quite realistic. It all might happen any day. I shall go on happening to some one, and you to someone else, every day.”

“I see; it is realism because it will not end anywhere in particular.”

“Will you listen to a fable?” she demanded suddenly.

“Is it a little thing of your own? Of course I shall listen.”

“Once there was a princess—”

“Dear me!” I cried. “I’m sorry for that. Doesn’t a story that begins with a heroine instead of with a hero always end sadly?”

“This is a fable,” she said. “It was a long time ago, when the heroine _could_ be named Maud, though this heroine was not. Well, the princess fell in love with a prince.”

“Do you mean _first_?” I asked.

“I know what you will say,” she continued, not heeding my interruption. “She should not have loved the prince. She should have loved some romantically impossible person. Anyway, she loved the prince; and more absurd still, the prince loved the princess. You can see how much more artistic it would have been for the prince to have been indifferent. He might at least have had the artistic decency to love the other princess—or to think that he did, which would have done for a while; but he was a nice prince, and he loved the princess. At least, you will say, there should be a parental obstacle, an old fool of a king with other plans. Or it might be an ill-tempered queen with a bad complexion. She would have been useful in a good many ways. But, no; not a single relative opposed either the prince or the princess.”

“Then what on earth did they do?” I asked.

“Happily there appeared a sinister little dwarf. I don’t remember where he came from, but he was U. C. in the nick of time or heaven knows what _would_ have happened. ‘See here,’ said the dwarf, ‘she will be perfectly insufferable if you act in this way. Women are not what they used to be.’ ‘Oh, come now,’ said the prince, ‘I have heard that before.’ ‘I assure you,’ persisted the dwarf, ‘that what women get easily they don’t value at all. You will make her think there are no other fish in the sea. She will expect too much of you. You will never be able to live up to the situation. Moreover, she never will feel the delight of possession that comes after doubt and difficulty. She will sigh for something that can come only after the sweet agony of deferred hope.’ ‘Aren’t you getting rather deep?’ asked the prince. But the dwarf held to the point. ‘Whom Love loveth he perplexeth. First make her doubt,’ he said, ‘or she never will believe.’ Then the dwarf went to the heroine. ‘Your Highness,’ he began, then dropped his flourish, and stepping close to her, whispered: ‘You are making a great mistake. You never can hold the prince. You act like a shop girl who has won the floor walker. You have the engaged look in its most silly form. You threw yourself at him. You know you did. He knows you did. When you are securely married he will act accordingly. Your mother was frantic for him, and has done her best to help you make yourself ridiculous. Everybody is tittering over the way you dote on him. Don’t be a fool.’ Well, if either the prince or the princess had been marrying for policy this chatter would have done no harm. But they were marrying for love, and love has nerves. Love lacks that conservative leash that lies in an extraneous motive; and by an absurd chance the dwarf precipitated an actual quarrel, the prince got to flirting with a middle-aged duchess whom he despised, and the princess, in a jealous fit, gave a peevish, mischief-making dowager aunt the opportunity she long had been looking for, and the match was broken off.”

“Well,” I asked patiently, “who was the dwarf?”

“The spirit of romance, of course, the principle which insists that something shall happen every thousand words—Oh, an entertaining and well-meaning fellow, promising that everything shall come out all right in the end, whatever happens. But you can’t trust him. And if he does fling his hand at the end and assure you that everything is all right, _is_ everything all right? Do the scars count for nothing? Will the interest of joy on the investment of misery prove to be a fair compensation? Realism doesn’t promise so much. Realism doesn’t always insist on a wedding, but may it not say quite as truthfully sometimes that they lived happily ever after?”

“I like your fable well enough,” I said. “I should reward you by telling another. But it would be a pity to spoil by any attempt at the antithetical the fine neutral effect of your picture. You see, if nothing more happens, it is realism. If they marry after all, it is romance. Do you know that I sometimes have thought that life is so much colored by art that some people are afraid to let matters turn out happily at the end for sheer dread of being romantic. After all, marriage is very romantic. It is so romantic that romance chooses it for the finale, for the supreme reward; while realism every day is insisting that it shall be the dreadful thing that has happened before the curtain goes up. Yes, I know that realism marries too, but shamefacedly, with a reservation. A realistic marriage is as intensely qualified as an emotion by Henry James. You may not discern the string that is attached to it. But it is there. The author likes to leave that reservation rankling in your mind. I love thorough-going romance for one thing: its habit of not annoying you with qualifying elements. It likes to stir things up prodigiously, but it isn’t mean about it. It doesn’t describe a lovely scene and then temper the sentimentality of the moment by having the gardener’s wheelbarrow under the window creak maddeningly. It not only doesn’t mate a little, slope-shouldered hero and a tall heroine with freckles, but it exhibits from end to end that antipathy to what really has happened which is characteristic of all enduring art.”

“You are saying that as if you actually meant it. My suspicion is that your ardor is incited by the spectacle of a woman defending realism. A man likes his heroines to be romantic, that is to say, sentimental. The traditional attitude of a woman _is_ sentimental. The whole structure of a man’s scheme is based upon that assumption. Man doesn’t like to see woman without awe. He doesn’t like to see her belittle the tragedy of life or to hear her say in the presence of comedy, as Stevenson said of his ‘Prince Otto,’ that ‘none of it is exactly funny, but some of it is smiling.’ Yet in spite of your prejudices, I am much afraid that the American girl is a realist. If she consents to glance at romance it must be romance leavened by satire.”

“I wish that I might contradict you, but I fear that Miss America is realistic. The worst of it is, that she makes it become her somehow. But I insist that, broadly, this is wrong. Art and logical realism are contradictions, and despite tradition I believe that the American girl is too reasonable to like unmitigated realism. She is more superbly alive to facts than any other girl in the world, for she reads what she chooses, and, to supplement that uncertain agency, sees pretty much all that goes on in the world. She is not so greatly as formerly under the necessity suggested by Franklin to a woman friend, to ‘have a good dictionary at hand to consult immediately when you meet with a word you do not comprehend the precise meaning of.’ But she is not without sentiment. Her patriotism declares this. Moreover, she reads most of the novels, and most of the novels are not realistic. Now, here is a novel that interests me for several reasons. It is a bright book. It is more than a bright book. It is a strong book. I am going to let you read it if you finish ‘Monte Cristo’ before dinner.”

“Don’t keep me waiting for the name.”

“It has one of those blind names that you like if you like the book. It is called ‘The Sacrifice.’ It has a heroine who has won me completely. With no disparagement to you, she is an American heroine.”

“What is the book about?”

“Mostly it is about this girl, and I assure you that you will not think there is too much of her. You see, I am particular about my heroines. I can go a little haziness, or a little crudeness, in the heroes I read, but I like the heroines—”

“To be like Mercedes?”

“One can’t complain of Dumas there. Mercedes is one of the most human characters in ‘Monte Cristo.’”

“Is there not a touch of satire in that?”

“You have read that book before,” I declared emphatically.

“A long time ago. But let me hear about ‘The Sacrifice.’”

“The heroine of ‘The Sacrifice’—but I should not destroy your interest in the story.”

“Please go on.”

“This girl makes a mistake in throwing over a young fellow—”