“It may be pure curiosity, Professor, but even if Rosalind did not have ‘a doublet and hose in her disposition,’ it seems to me that we well may wonder how far the current bloomer affects the mind of the current young woman. It cannot be possible that so momentous and revolutionary a condition as the bloomer shall be without effect upon the mind of woman—and not merely upon the women who wear them, but upon the whole sex. It has been said that not only the physical structure but the character of men have been modified by the fact that men persistently avoid bagging their trousers at the knees. Will not the divided skirt divide woman’s attention—”
“As for bloomers,” said the Professor, “and all related forms of dual garmentature, I am going to lecture about them before the Zenith Club, and, if you are very good, when my paper is quite completed I shall read it to you. Meanwhile, I may remark that the bloomer is not ‘current’ at all, save, perhaps, in a modified and semi-visible way in partnership with an abbreviated skirt,—but this is anticipating.”
VII
CHANCE AND CHOICE
A distinguished general and admirable gentleman once was said to have lost the Presidency because he called the tariff a “local issue.” It might be difficult for us to discipline Coleridge for calling love a “local anguish.” Yet the plausibility of the statement should not defend the culprit. Love is, actually, not at all local, particularly when it is an anguish. It is immensely pervasive, an international issue, an inter-planetary, a universal issue. The light of love may be hidden under the bushel of modesty, yet its undaunted X-rays will penetrate the farthermost spaces.
But it is too late, or too early, in other words wholly unfashionable, to write about love, and I certainly should not have committed the offence of the foregoing paragraph had it not been for an entirely orderly and even timely thought as to the possibility that love, like any other malady or manifestation, might have a purely national flavor, not merely in its outward symptoms, but in its inherent quality. That is to say, I had wondered in what way, if in any way, the American girl’s definition of love would be distinctive. If I had asked the Professor, she would, had she consented to take me seriously, have described love as “the sum and sublimation of all possible inter-human attachments,” or something of that sort. She would have been abstract, for woman, however personal she may incline to be by virtue of her sex and method, loves the abstract in definition for so much of reservation as it may leave to her. There is safety and breathing room in a large definition. Doubtless we never shall be able to get at Miss America’s sentiments except in a purely empirical way, and if I were writing a treatise instead of setting down a few notes, I should have felt an obligation to study out the question by observing critically the conduct of the American girl in the processes of courtship.
The difficulty of such observation always must lie in the fact that the most interested man in any specific instance himself is wholly incapable of making report if he would. A man who could be analytical in any circumstances which included a settlement of his own fate, would be fit for every treason. He might go through a variety of mental motions which to him, at the time, passed for the convolutions of pure reason. He might, and doubtless often has, fancied himself as studying her, as penetrating the mask of her femininity, as dispassionately dissecting her sentiments. Indeed, every prudent man must at some stage weigh, with whatever sobriety may be possible to him, the chances of what she will say; and this must always include some estimate of what she is thinking.
The relationship between what she is thinking and what she will say is one of the most complex in nature, and I fancy that in our climate and environment its fundamental complexity has been increased. I know that it is the habit of science to assume that the reason woman seems more contradictory than man is not that she is dishonest, but that she is impulsive. Impulse naturally is far less uniform than reason. “They change their opinions,” complains Heine, “as often as they change their dress,” a sentiment which proves conclusively that Heine had credulous intervals. A woman who always had the same opinion would instinctively realize the stupidity of that condition, as she would the condition of always being seen in the same dress; and if she didn’t have a new opinion she might do with the old opinion as with the old dress, turn or cut it over. You cannot say from the notorious inaccuracy of a woman’s gesture when she presumes to place her hand on her heart, that she has not a heart, that she is unaware of its precise location, or that it is not in the right place.