“Well, how does she enslave them?”
“It’s like this, Mamma. The first time I ever saw her, I was dancing with Harrison, and he happened to point her out to me. He’d just met her and didn’t take any interest in her at all. He really didn’t. Well, a minute or two later she danced near us and spoke to him over her partner’s shoulder as they passed us. ‘I heard something terrible about you!’ was what she said, and she danced on away, looking back at him over her shoulder. Pretty soon someone cut in and took me away, and Harrison went straight and cut in and danced with Sallie Ealing almost all the rest of the evening. The next day he and I were playing over the course and when we finished she was just starting out from the club in a car with one of the boys. She called back to Harrison, ‘I dreamed about you last night!’ and he was terribly silly: he kept calling after her, ‘What was the dream?’ And she kept calling back, ‘I’ll never tell you!’ Mamma, that’s what she does with them all.”
“Tells them she’s dreamed about them?”
“No,” Anne said. “That’s just a sample of her ‘line.’ When she dances near another girl and her partner, she’ll say to the other girl’s partner, ‘Got something queer to tell you,’ or ‘I heard something about you last night,’ or ‘Wait till you hear what I know about you,’ or something like that; and, of course, he’ll get rid of the girl he’s with as soon as he can and go to find out. She almost never passes a man at a dance, or on the links, without either calling to him if he’s not near her, or whispering to him if he is. It’s always some absolutely silly little mystery she makes up about him—and almost her whole stock in trade is that she’s heard something about ’em, or thought something curious about ’em, or dreamed about ’em. It’s always something about them, of course. Then they follow her around to find out, and she doesn’t tell ’em, so they keep on following her around, and she gets them so excited about themselves that then they get excited about her—and she makes ’em think she’s thinking about them mysteriously—and they get so they can’t see anybody but Sallie Ealing! They don’t know what a cheap bait she’s caught ’em with, Mamma;—they don’t even guess she’s used bait! That’s why I don’t feel as if I could ever respect a man again. And the unfairness of it is so strange! The rest of us could use those tricks if we were willing to be that cheap and that childish; but we can’t even tell the men that we wouldn’t stoop to do it! We can’t do anything because they’d think we’re jealous of her. What can we do, Mamma?”
Mrs. Cromwell sighed and shook her head. “I’m afraid a good many generations of girls have had their Sallie Ealings, dear.”
“You mean there isn’t anything we can do?” Anne asked, and she added, with a desolate laugh, “I just said that, myself. But men do things when they feel like this, don’t they, Mamma? Why is it a girl can’t? Why do I have to sit still and see men I’ve respected and looked up to and thought so wise and fine—why do I have to sit still and see them hoodwinked and played upon and carried off their feet by such silly little barefaced tricks, Mamma? And why don’t they see what it is, themselves, Mamma? Any girl or woman—the very stupidest—can see it, Mamma, so why doesn’t the cleverest man? Are men all just idiots, Mamma? Are they?”
This little tumult of hurried and emotional questions pressed upon the harassed mother for but a single reply. “Yes, dear,” she said. “They are. It’s a truth we have to find out, and the younger we are when we find out, the better for us. We have to learn to forgive them for it and to respect them for the intelligence they show in other ways—but about the Sallie Ealings and what we used to call ‘women’s wiles,’ we have to face the fact that men are—well, yes—just idiots!”
“All men, Mamma?”
“I’m afraid so!”
“And there’s nothing to do about it?”