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.”