Let no young lady who has read the above passage with indignation suppose that it was an attempt to describe her particular type. The very fact that she has felt indignant about it sufficiently proves that it does not refer to her in the least; so she can set her mind at rest and absolve me of any intention of slighting or offending her.
If, however, she has read the words with a feeling of passionate anger—anger at the thought that all I have said truly applies to her, though no longer now, alas!—no longer at her present stage in life;—if, therefore, her emotion is the righteous anger of one who is filled with regret and sorrow for the things that she now recognizes as having once been hers, though they are hers no longer;—things she is still young enough to possess, though they have been filched from her by her environment and her unsound mode of life—I, as the mere analyst in this affair, applaud her feeling, and am glad that she has not yet reached that stage of listless resignation when youth, positiveness and ardour have ceased from moving her or from exciting her longing. If once she has been the girl I have just described, and she has deteriorated or grown negative, either (1) through a too prolonged and too exhausting wait, and a period too protracted of absolute abstinence; or (2) through unwholesome living, or—which is worst of all—(3) through marrying a man who has not proved the “Saviour of her body”; then I, too, join my anger to hers, and am perhaps even more angry than she; because all those who have a keen appreciation of quality, must loathe to see it squandered, destroyed or so badly mismanaged as to be made a thing of naught.
The three causes of deterioration and deflection to negativeness will now be examined separately, and in the order of the numbers given above.
(1) Maybe that at seventeen, or perhaps eighteen, the positive English girl was fully equipped, and felt herself fully equipped. Maybe Nature itself at that age had concentrated all its most subtle art on the one task of making her as attractive and as irresistible as possible. Her top wave came with her nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first years—all years of bewilderingly beautiful ripeness, when every fibre in her body was agog, on the qui vive, harking for the approach of the mate that would justify all this sumptuous and generous preparation; harking timidly, though eagerly, for him who would consummate her expectant womanhood, give the only genuine value that they could claim to all her wondrous charms, and reveal herself to herself in all her wealth of ancestral virtues, gifts and skill.
She had received her pearl necklace; she had received her golden bracelets; she wore on her right hand a ring that had belonged to her grandmother; but now she wanted the crowning jewel of all, the hall-mark of her genuine womanhood—the little band of gold that was the emblem of matrimony.
Her twenty-second year went by, and nothing happened. Her twenty-third and twenty-fourth vanished also, and still her insignia were incomplete. But there was time yet, and anxiety, though present, was by no means acute. She was prepared for another year, or two, or even three, of patient waiting.
Since, however, it is impossible even for Nature herself to stand for ever on the tiptoe of anticipation; since it is too much to expect of anything or anybody, that weariness will not ultimately supervene if a wait is prolonged unduly, or if nothing—aye, nothing!—ever comes to repay an all too lavish outlay of beauty and its promise of joys untasted; it is, alas, a not uncommon occurrence—however ready the girl herself may be to continue waiting and watching—for Nature itself to feel so bitterly snubbed that it withdraws, as it were, from its position of proud and unstinting impresario, and wanders off elsewhere to spread its ornaments and charms over another and perhaps more fortunate subject.
This stage in the positive English girl’s career is not apparent to the outsider, nor is it immediately apparent to the girl herself. All she knows is that she does not feel quite as well as she used to feel. She does not sleep so well, eat so well, or resist fatigue so well. She is not conscious, yet, that her looks are no longer so startlingly attractive as they were three or four years ago; but there is a shade of difference of which even she herself is aware on certain days. Her face is beginning to acquire definition. Her features do not melt into one another with the same indefinite sweep of downy cuticle; while the tone has also begun to decline in her bigger organs, and they are losing the braced, tense, healthy readiness they possessed at the beginning of the wait.
She may have all kinds of disorders now which she did not have at the moment of her top wave, while a concomitant depression of spirit makes her feel less keen about life, less eager about its mysteries. There is even a threat of anæmia—the result of occasional costiveness, its frequent correlative leucorrhœa, and a general lack of tone in her whole system. A neglected organ avenges itself, a neglected body avenges itself; her whole spirit wishes to avenge itself; for, like a flower, she needed the sun—in her case the sun of love—and she is visibly withering without it.[46]