“Oh, he’s probably used to it,” said her neighbor on the other side. “They say he’s spoken before any number of women’s clubs. He does two a day sometimes. He’s seen lots of American society women before now.”
Madeleine stared at him curiously. “I wonder what he thinks of us! I wonder! I’d give anything to know!” she said. She repeated this sentiment in varying forms several times.
Lydia wondered why Madeleine should care so acutely about the opinion of a stranger and a foreigner, and finally, in her naïve, straightforward way, she put this question to her. Madeleine was not one of the many who evaded Lydia’s questions, or answered them only with a laugh at their oddity. She was very straightforward herself and generally had a very clear idea of what underlay any action or feeling on her part. But this time her usual rough-and-ready methods of analysis seemed at fault.
“Oh, because,” she said indefinitely. “Don’t you always want to know what men are thinking of you?”
“Men that know something about me, maybe,” Lydia amended.
Madeleine laughed. “They’re the ones that don’t think at all, one way or the other,” she reminded her sister-in-law.
The president of the club rose. Her introduction of the speaker was greeted with cordial, muted applause from gloved hands. There was a scraping of chairs, a stir of draperies, and little gusts of delicate perfumes floated out, as the hundred or more women settled themselves at the right angle, all their keen, handsome, nervous faces lifted to the speaker in a pleasant expectancy. Not only were they agreeably aware that they were forming part of one of the most recherché events of Endbury’s social life, but they were remembering piquant rumors of M. Buisine’s sensational attacks on American materialism. The afternoon promised something more interesting than their usual programme of home-made essays and papers.
Their expectation was not disappointed. In fluent English, apparently smooth with long practice on the same theme, he wove felicitous and forceful elaborations on the proverb relating to people who are absent and the estimation in which they are held by those present. He had seen in America, he said, everything but the American man. He had seen hundreds and thousands of women as well-dressed as Parisiennes (and, as a rule, much more expensively), as self-possessed as English great ladies, as cultivated as Russian princesses, as universally and variously handsome as visions in a painter’s dream—(“He’s not afraid of laying it on thick, is he?” whispered Madeleine with an appreciative laugh)—but, except for a few professors in college, he had seen no men. He had inquired for them everywhere and was told that he did not see them because he was a man of letters. If he had been the inventor of a new variety of railroad brake he would have seen millions. He was told that the men, unlike their wives, had no intellectual interests, had no clubs with any serious purposes, had no artistic aims, had no home life, no knowledge of their children, no interest in education—that, in short, they left the whole business of worthy living to their wives, and devoted themselves exclusively to the wild-beast joys of tearing and rending their business competitors.
He gave many picturesque instances of his contention, he sketched several lively and amusing portraits of the one or two business men he had succeeded in running down; their tongue-tied stupefaction before the ordinary topics of civilization, their scorn of all æsthetic considerations; their incapacity to conceive of an intellectual life as worthy a grown man; the Stone-age simplicity with which they referred everything to savage cunning; their oblivion to any other standard than “success,” by which they meant possessing something that they had taken away by force from somebody else.
It was indeed a very entertaining lecture, a most stimulating, interesting experience to the crowd of well-dressed women; although perhaps some of them found it a little long after the dining-room across the hall began to be filled with waiters preparing the refreshments and an appetizing smell of freshly-made coffee filled the air. Still, it was a lecture they had paid for, and it was gratifying to have it so full and conscientiously elaborated.