The College Girl of Fact
This, I say, is the college girl of tradition, of the older comic papers. But what is the simple fact?—no, I cannot say the simple fact, for she is a fact of the most complex variety; what, rather is the literal, photographable truth? Very different, surely from the absurdities of satire; in fact, simply the American girl, alive to all of life, woman first and student afterward, continually up to the mischief of teasing the social scientist by being lovely and actually marrying, college education and all!
Yes, we are making some new traditions. The new old maid is a charming perplexity. The old maids of the past read Plato together and established Boston marriages. They read in Cicero and elsewhere that friendship is less undebatable than love. The traditional old maid talked about “the faded fire of chivalry.” Like Walpole on his Paris journey, she “fell in love with twenty things and in hate with forty,” which fully restored her equilibrium. Yet she did not “vow an eternal misery,” nor grow combative at the thought that St. Chrysostom found woman to be a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination and a painted ill. She acquired a beautiful serenity. She could read Schopenhauer’s proposition to rid the world of old maids by establishing polygamy, without even an audible snort of contempt. She filled her leisure by admonitions to younger girls as to the fathomless hazards of credulity. She was securely and splendidly detached.
Of the new old maid, variously titled, it is, of course, too early to write. Whether she is sweeter or the world less sour, there certainly is less antipathy between her and the world. Society certainly likes her. She has been discovered to be immensely convenient. She has no asperity. “It is not,” she murmurs to man, “that I love you less, but that I love my freedom more,” for answer to which, man is sitting up o’ nights in profound thought. She does not even claim that her mood is permanent. At the first feeling of heart failure she knows just when to appoint a receiver.
All women can fool us some of the time, and some women can fool us all of the time.
IX
“AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED”
