The men who live in these places, whether as nomadic or permanent guests, never have money enough to marry on; and the flirtations always budding and blossoming by the piano or about the billiard-table never by any chance fructify in marriage. But in spite of their infertile experience you see the same mother and the same daughter year after year, season after season, returning to the charge with renewed vigour, and a hope which is the one indestructible thing about them. Let us deal tenderly with them, poor impecunious nomads; drifting like so much sea-wrack along the restless current of life; and wish them some safe resting-place before it is too late.
A lady nomad of this kind, especially one with a daughter, is strictly orthodox and cultivates with praiseworthy perseverance the society of any clergyman who may have wandered into the community of which she is a member. She is punctual in church-going; and the minister is flattered by her evident appreciation of his sermons, and the readiness with which she can remember certain points of last Sunday's discourse. As a rule she is Evangelically inclined, and is as intolerant of Romanism on the one hand as of Rationalism on the other. She has seen the evils of both, she says, and quotes the state of Rome and of Heidelberg in confirmation. She is as strict in morals as in orthodoxy, and no woman who has got herself talked about, however innocently, need hope for much mercy at her hands. Her Rhadamanthine faculty has apparently ample occasion for exercise, for her list of scandalous chronicles is extensive; and if she is to be believed, she and her daughter are almost the sole examples of a pure and untainted womanhood afloat. She is as rigid too, in all matters connected with her social status; and brings up her daughter in the same way of thinking. By virtue of the admiral or the major, at peace in his grave, they are emphatically ladies; and, though nomadic, impecunious, homeless, and tant soit peu adventuresses, they class themselves as of the cream of the cream, and despise those whose rank is of the uncovenanted kind, and who are gentry, may be, by the grace of God only without any Act of Parliament to help.
Sometimes the lady nomad is a spinster, not necessarily passée, though obviously she cannot be in her first youth; still she may be young enough to be attractive, and adventurous enough to care to attract. Women of this kind, unmarried, nomadic and still young, work themselves into every movement afoot. They even face the perils and discomforts of war-time, and tell their friends at home that they are going out as nurses to the wounded. That dash of the adventuress, of which we have spoken before, runs through all this section of the social nomads; and one wonders why some uncle or cousin, some aunt or family friend, does not catch them up in time.
If not attractive nor passably young, these nomadic spinsters are sure to be exceedingly odd. Constant friction with society in its most selfish form, the absence of home-duties, the want of the sweetness and sincerity of home love, and the habit of change, bring out all that is worst in them and kill all that is best. They have nothing to hope for from society and less to lose; it is wearisome to look amiable and sweet-tempered when you feel bitter and disappointed; and politeness is a farce where the fact of the day is a fight. So the nomadic spinster who has lived so long in this rootless way that she has ceased even to make such fleeting friendships as the mode of life affords—has ceased even to wear the transparent mark of such thin politeness as is required—becomes a 'character' notorious in proportion to her candour. She never stays long in one establishment, and generally leaves abruptly because of a misunderstanding with some other lady, or maybe because some gentleman has unwittingly affronted her. She and the officer's widow are always on peculiarly unfriendly terms, for she resents the pretensions of the officer's daughter, and calls her a bold minx or a sly puss almost within hearing; while she throws grave doubts on the widow herself, and drops hints which the rest of the community gather up like manna, and keep by them, to much the same result as that of the wilderness. But the nomadic spinster soon wanders away to another temporary resting-place; and before half her life is done she becomes as well known to the heads of the various establishments in her line as the taxgatherer himself, and dreaded almost as much.
Nomads are generally remarkable for not leaving tracks behind them. You see them here and there, and they are sure to turn up at Baden-Baden or at Vichy, at Scarborough or at Dieppe, when you least expect them; but you know nothing about them in the interim. They are like those birds which hybernate at some place of retreat no one yet ever found; or like those which migrate, who can tell where? They come and they go. You meet and part and meet again in all manner of unlikely places; and it seems to you that they have been over half the world since you last met, you meanwhile having settled quietly to your work, save for your summer holiday which you are now taking, and which you are enjoying as the nomad cannot enjoy any change that falls to his lot. He is sated with change; wearied of novelty; yet unable to fix himself, however much he may wish it. He has got into the habit of change; and the habit clings even when the desire has gone. Always hoping to be at rest, always intending to settle as years flow on, he never finds the exact place to suit him; only when he feels the end approaching, and by reason of old age and infirmity is a nuisance in the community where formerly he was an acquisition, and where too all that once gave him pleasure has now become an insupportable burden and weariness—only then does he creep away into some obscure and lonely lodging, where he drags out his remaining days alone, and dies without the touch of one loved hand to smooth his pillow, without the sound of one dear voice to whisper to him courage, farewell, and hope. The home he did not plant when he might is impossible to him now, and there is no love that endures if there is no home in which to keep it. And so all the class of social nomads find when dark days are on them, and society, which cares only to be amused, deserts them in their hour of greatest need.
GREAT GIRLS.
Nothing is more distinctive among women than the difference of relative age to be found between them. Two women of the same number of years will be substantially of different epochs of life—the one faded in person, wearied in mind, fossilized in sympathy; the other fresh both in face and feeling, with sympathies as broad and keen as they were when she was in her first youth; with a brain still as receptive, as quick to learn, a temper still as easy to be amused, as ready to love, as when she emerged from the school-room to the drawing-room. The one you suspect of understating her age by half-a-dozen years or more when she tells you she is not over forty; the other makes you wonder if she has not overstated hers by just so much when she laughingly confesses to the same age. The one is an old woman who seems as if she had never been young, the other 'just a great girl yet,' who seems as if she would never grow old; and nothing is equal between them but the number of days each has lived.
This kind of woman, so fresh and active, so intellectually as well as emotionally alive, is never anything but a girl; never loses some of the sweetest characteristics of girlhood. You see her first as a young wife and mother, and you imagine she has left the school-room for about as many months as she has been married years. Her face has none of that untranslatable expression, that look of robbed bloom, which experience gives; in her manner is none of the preoccupation so observable in most young mothers, whose attention never seems wholly given to the thing on hand, and whose hearts seem always full of a secret care or an unimparted joy. Brisk and airy, braving all weathers, ready for any amusement, interested in the current questions of history and society, by some wonderful faculty of organizing seeming to have all her time to herself as if she had no house cares and no nursery duties, yet these somehow not neglected, she is the very ideal of a happy girl roving through life as through a daisy field, on whom sorrow has not yet laid its hand and to whose lot has fallen no Dead Sea apple. And when one hears her name and style for the first time as a matron, and sees her with two or three sturdy little fellows hanging about her slender neck and calling her mamma, one feels as if nature had somehow made a mistake, and that our slim and simple-mannered damsel had only made-believe to have taken up the serious burdens of life, and was nothing but a great girl after all.