What is to be done to balance things evenly in this unequal world of sex? What indeed, is to be done at any time to reconcile strength with weakness, and to give each its due? One thing at least is sure. The more thoroughly women learn the true nature of men, the fewer mistakes they will make and the less unhappiness they will create for themselves; and the more patient men are with the hysterical excitability, the restless craving, which nature, for some purpose at present unknown, has made the special temperament of women, the fewer femmes incomprises there will be in married homes and the larger the chance of married happiness. All one's theories of domestic life come down at last to the give-and-take system, to bearing and forbearing, and meeting half way idiosyncrasies which one does not personally share.
SOCIAL NOMADS.
As there are wandering tribes which neither build houses nor pitch their tents in one place, so there are certain social nomads who never seem to have a home of their own, and who do not make one for themselves by remaining long in any other person's. They are always moving about and are to be met everywhere; at all sea-side places; at all show places; in Switzerland, France, Italy and Germany; where they live chiefly in pensions at moderate charges, or in meagre lodgings affiliated to a populous table d'hôte much frequented by the English. For one characteristic of social nomads is the strange way in which they congregate together, expatiating on the delights of life abroad, while seeing nothing but the outside of things from the centre of a dense Britannic circle.
Another characteristic is their chronic state of impecuniosity, and the desire of looking like the best on a fixed income of slender dimensions. Hence they are obliged to organize their expenditure on a very narrow basis, and therefore live in boarding-houses, pensions, or wherever good-sized rooms, a sufficient table, and a constant current of society are to be had at small individual cost. As they are people who travel much, they can speak two or three languages, but only as those who have learnt by ear and not by book. They know nothing of foreign literature, and but little of their own, save novels and the class which goes by the name of 'light.' Indeed all the reading they accomplish is confined to newspapers, magazines and novels. But at home, and among those who have not been to Berlin, who have never seen Venice, and to whom Paris is a dream still to be realized, they assume an intimate acquaintance with both the literature and the politics of the Continent—especially the politics—and laugh at the English press for its blindness and onesidedness. They happen to know beyond all doubt how this Correspondent was bought over with so much money down; how that one is in the toils of such or such a Minister's wife; why a third got his appointment; how a fourth keeps his; and they could, if they chose, give you chapter and verse for all they say.
If they chance to have been in India some twenty or thirty years ago, they will tell you why the Mutiny took place, and how the change of Government works; and they can put their fingers on all the sore places of the Empire, beginning with the distribution of patronage and ending with the deficiency of revenue, as aptly as if they were on the spot and had the confidence of the ruling officials. But in spite of these little foibles they are amusing companions as a rule, if shallow and radically ill-informed; and as it is for their own interest to be good company, they have cultivated the art of conversation to the highest pitch of which they are capable, and can entertain if not instruct. When they aim at instruction indeed, they are pretty sure to miss the mark; and the social nomad who lays down the law on foreign statesmen and politics, and who speaks from personal knowledge, is just the one authority not to be accepted.
Always living in public, yet having to fight, each for his own hand, the manners of social nomads in pensions are generally a strange mixture of suavity and selfishness; and the small intrigues and crafty stratagems going on among them for the possession of the favourite seat in the drawing-room, the special attention of the head-waiter at table, the earliest attendance of the housemaid in the morning, is in strange contrast with the ready smiles, the personal flatteries, the affectation of sympathetic interest kept for show. But every social nomad knows how to appraise this show at its just value, and can weigh it in the balance to a grain. He does not much prize it; for he knows one characteristic of these communities to be that everybody speaks against everybody else, and that all concur in speaking against the management.
Still, life seems to go easily enough among them. They are all well-dressed and for the most part have their tempers under control. Some of the women play well, and some sing prettily. There are always to be found a sufficient number of the middle-aged of either sex to make up a whist-table, where the game is sound and sometimes brilliant; and there are sure to be men who play billiards creditably and with a crisp, clean stroke worth looking at. And there are very often lively women who make amusement for the rest. But these are smartly handled behind backs, though they are petted in public and undeniably useful to the society at large.
The nomadic widow is by some odd fatality generally the widow of an officer, naval or military, to whose rank she attaches an almost superstitious value, thinking that when she can announce herself as the relict of a major or an admiral she has given an unanswerable guarantee and smoothed away all difficulties. She may have many daughters, but more probably she has only one;—for where olive-branches abound nomadism is more expensive than housekeeping, and to live in one's own house is less costly than to live in a boarding-house. But of this one daughter the nomadic widow makes much to the community; and especially calls attention to her simplicity and absolute ignorance of the evils so familiar to the girls of the present day. And she looks as if she expects to be believed. Perhaps credence is difficult; the young lady in question having been for some years considerably in public, where she has learnt to take care of herself with a skill which, how much soever it may be deserving of praise, can scarcely claim to be called ingenuous. She has need of this skill; for, apparently, she and her mother have no male relations belonging to them, and if flirtations are common with the nomadic tribe, marriages are rare. Poor souls; one cannot but pity them for all their labour in vain, all their abortive hopes. For though there is more society in the mode of life they have chosen than they would have had if they had lived quietly down in the village where they were known and respected, and where, who knows? the fairy prince might one day have alighted—there are very few chances; and marriages among 'the inmates' are as rare as winter swallows.