GIRLS AND OTHER GIRLS
"Thou art so very sweet and fair,
With such a heaven in thine eyes,
It almost seems an over-care
To ask thee to be good or wise.
"As if a little bird were blamed
Because its song unthinking flows;
As if a rose should be ashamed
Of being nothing but a rose."
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"It is so hard for Shrewdness to admit
Folly means no harm when she calls black white."
People who criticise the grammar of those young girls who say "I don't think," should have a care. For it is more true than incorrect. Most girls don't think.
But there are two kinds of girls—girls under twenty-five and others.
Of course, although you may not know it, age has no more to do with that statement than it had to do with the one when I hinted that man reached the ripe state of perfection at the mystic age of thirty-five. These are but approximate figures, and are only for use in general practice. They have no bearing on specific cases, when it is always best to call in a specialist.
I know many girls who are still seeing and hearing unintelligently, and have not begun to assimilate knowledge, even at twenty-five. I know others of twenty, who have assimilated so well that they will never be under twenty-five. But it is a literal fact, and this statement I am willing to live up to, that the majority of girls must have lived through their first youth before a thinking person can take any comfort with them.
I am sure Samuel Johnson had this in mind when he said: "'Tis a terrible thing that we cannot wish young ladies well without wishing them to become old women." Or possibly the exclamation was wrung from him after an attempt to talk to one of them. Many brave men, who would stop a runaway horse, or who would dare to look for burglars under the bed, quail utterly before the prospect of talking to a young girl who frankly says, "I don't think."
How can those girls, who give evidence of no more thought than is evinced by their namby-pamby chatter, call their existence living? They mistake pertness for wit; audacity for cleverness; disrespect to old age for independence; and general bad manners for individuality. Has nobody ever trained these girls to think? What kind of schools do they attend? Who has spoiled them by flattery, until they are little peacocks to whom a mirror is an irresistible temptation?
Why do unthinking parents supply them with money, and never ask how they spend it? How does it come that if you want to find great numbers of them together you go to Huyler's instead of to Brentano's? What kind of women will these girls make, to whom a wrinkle in their waist is of more moment than their soul's salvation?
I often wonder what kind of mothers these girls have. Surely there can be no family conversation where they live. Surely they never hear the great questions of the day discussed at the dinner-table. From the number of hours they spend upon the street, I often am tempted to say, what the poor, tired woman, who stood for miles in the street-car, said to her fellow-passengers, "Have none of yez homes?"
Poor, empty-pated little creatures! Poor lovely little clothes-racks, who occasionally organize a concert for newsboys whose lives are busier and more useful than their own! A Street Waifs' Benefit for Street Waifs!
If the crude young person who stands with such eager feet where the brook and river meet that she has wetted her pretty shoon in her haste to be in the society of men could only have the wit to sing:
"O wad some power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as others see us,"
she might discover strange points of resemblance between herself and a very young baby.
In the earliest days of earthly existence a baby is in a jelly-fish state, from which no one can say what he will emerge. His brain is a sponge. He receives everything and gives nothing. He is pretty to look at, and seems made for nothing but love. He coos and gurgles, he seldom does anything more intelligent than to smile, and he prefers men to women.
The greatest fault that thinking men find with this sort of girl is, that she becomes sillier every day that she lives. I have heard women complain of the degeneracy of the boys who seek their daughters in marriage; but when I look at the many girls of this type I am tempted to say, "Well, madam, who but a degenerate would care to marry your daughter?"
Men claim that it is difficult to maintain their ideals in regard to women, in the face of such selfishness, crudeness, bad manners, and jealousies as exist between young girls of this sort. Of course, they who have become belles by reason of their lovely faces never know that the thinking class of young men criticise them adversely, and they would not care if they did. There are still many men who do admire and who will fall in love with them, and the others are not missed.
We must not blame them too severely for rejoicing in their loveliness. It might be a hard struggle for the rest of us not to do the same if we had their beauty.
Men often wonder why girls' friendships are so hollow. They wonder why we are so ungenerous to each other. "So hateful," we call it. Hateful is not a man's word. It is a woman's; and trust a woman to know exactly what it means.
Well, the truth of it is that men are at the bottom of a great deal of it. Girls seldom quarrel with each other except over some man, and, while they intend to be loyal to each other, they cannot seem to manage it if there is a man in the case.
Most girls have two natures. One she shows to men; the other to other girls. What we know of one is the way she droops and is so openly bored by other girls that it is quite a blow to our vanity to be obliged to be with her. We recognize the other at the approach of a man, even if we cannot see him, by the changes in the girl's face. She straightens herself, puts a hand on each side of her waist, and pushes her belt down lower, moistens her lips, a sparkle comes into her eyes, she touches her back hair, and runs a finger under the edge of her veil. Then she smiles—such a smile as the other girls have not been able to win from her in three hours.
These girls are very clever sometimes—even these little, soft, kitteny girls, who do not know anything about books, who never read, who never study, and are popularly called empty-headed even by the very men who make love to them. These girls are keen beyond words to express in their intuitive knowledge of human nature and the differentiation between man nature and woman nature. They are capable of using the outward and apparent motives of humanity for an effect, and secretly of plying the subtlest and most occult.
It is difficult to designate their exact methods, and dangerous to exploit them, for you immediately lay yourself open to the suspicion of being capable of the same double-dealing yourself, or of its being beneath your dignity to accuse any one of such duplicity; and yet there are the causes and there are the results. You can shut your eyes to them if you wish.
It is just here where a girl of this kind is so uncanny. Of course, for those of us who wish to take a lofty view of love and lovers, who wish to think each woman sought out by a man for her beauty and virtues and married for love, it is very repugnant to have to face the fact that there are hundreds of sweet, nice girls, of good family and good training, who regard the securing for themselves of another girl's lover a perfectly legitimate operation.
Not infrequently one hears it said that So-and-So is one of the most attractive girls in town, because she can cut any girl out that she tries to. You may say that a man so easily won is no great loss, or that such things may occur in other circles of society but not in yours. Possibly they do not. One does not deny the honor of honorable men and women in any walk in life. But in polite society, fashionable society, these things occur. Oftener in New York than in Boston, and oftener in London and Paris than in New York. Indeed, we may sneer, as we often do, at the primitive customs of the lowly, and at their absurd phrase of "keeping company." It makes a delightful jest. But beneath it is a greater regard for the rights of a man or woman in love than one is apt to find higher in the social scale.
With them, to select one another "to keep company," is like an offer of marriage. To "keep steady company" is the formal announcement of an engagement, which is a potential marriage. It is the first step towards matrimony, and is almost as sacred and final.
With their more fortunate and envied sisters in the smart set, an engagement is the loosest kind of a bond, and neither man nor woman is safe from the wooing of other men and women until the marriage vows have been pronounced, and, if your society is very fashionable, not even then.
So that this society of which I speak would undeniably be called "good."
Now, of course, all women desire to be loved. She is a very queer woman who would deny that proposition if asked by the right person, and I hope he would have sense enough not to believe her if she did. I do not object to a girl making herself attractive to men in a modest and maidenly way. On the contrary, I heartily approve of it. But I would have her select a man who belonged to no other girl, and to know that nothing but misery can result from the taking of a lover away from her friend.
It is the fashion for women to deny that this is done. I never could see why. But possibly they deny it because they are afraid, if they discuss it, that people will think some girl has lured a lover or two away from them.
People who have witnessed the outward results of this phenomenon also deny the true cause, on the ground that the robber girl was not clever enough to have done it. That she simply was more to the man's taste than the first girl, and so it was all the fault of the man.
Of course, I cannot deny the fickleness of man. But I do say that the girl hardly lives, no matter how pretty she is, who has not the wit to get another girl's lover if she wants him. It makes no difference how young she is, she never makes the mistake of disparaging the first girl. No woman of the world is less liable to such an error than a girl who deliberately intends to get another girl's lover.
She begins by gaining her confidence. Very likely she manages to stay all night with her. (That is the time when you tell everything you know, just because it is dark, and then spend the rest of your life wishing you hadn't.)
Then, when she has the points of the compass, so to speak, she says she will help her dear friend, and the dear friend, not being clever (or she wouldn't have confided), thinks she is the loveliest girl in the world, and, after promising to send her lover to call in order to be "helped," she calmly goes to sleep, just as if she has not seen the beginning of the end.
The other girl has observed—and she is, of course, pretty and attractive. Girls who do not know anything and who never study are always pretty. It is only the plain girl who is obliged to be clever. The first time she sees the lover of her dear friend she begins to laud her to the sky. She herself is looking so pretty, and she shows off in the most favorable light, while all the time singing her dear friend's praise with such fatal persistency that she fairly makes him sick of the sound of her name and of her namby-pamby virtues. Now the man would hardly be human if he did not tell this artless little creature that he had had enough of her dear friend, and that he would much prefer to talk about herself. Pouts of hurt surprise. She "thought you were such a friend of hers!" She "only wanted to entertain you by the only subject" she "thought would interest you." Presto! The entering wedge! She knows it, but the man does not. He has no idea of being disloyal to his sweetheart, but he is a lost man nevertheless—lost to the first girl and won by the second. Won in a perfectly harmless and legitimate way too. Won while doing her duty, keeping her promise, helping her friend. Her conscience acquits her. She has only observed and made use of her cleverness to know that too smooth and easy a course to true love generally gives him to the other girl.
But in reality she has stolen him—she has committed a real theft. And, personally, I should prefer to know her had she stolen money. You can jail a man who steals your watch, but the girl who steals a man's heart away from his sweetheart walks free, and uncondemned even—to their shame be it spoken—by those who know what she has done.
Nobody dares condemn her—even the friends of the robbed girl, for that presupposes some lack in her charm, and gives publicity to her loss. The wronged girl, because of her pride and conventionality and civilization, makes no outcry. A barbarian in her place would have fallen on the robber girl in a fury and scratched her eyes out. Sometimes I am sorry that our barbaric days are over.
Some of the greatest tragedies in life have come from this disloyalty among girls in their relations with each other.
I have no patience with those people who fall in love with forbidden property and give as their excuse, "I couldn't help it." Such culpable weakness is more dangerous to society than real wickedness.
Love is not a matter of infatuation. It is not the temptation which is wrong. It is the deliberate following it up, simply because the temptation is agreeable. Of course, it is agreeable! You are not often irresistibly tempted to go and have your teeth filled!
Men never will have done with their strictures on girls until girls achieve two things. One is to observe more honor in their relations with each other, and the other is to learn to think.