DRAWING-ROOM EPIPHYTES.
In every coterie we find certain stray damsels unattached; young ladies of personable appearance and showy accomplishments who go about the world alone, and whose parents, never seen, are living in some obscure lodgings where they pinch and screw to furnish their daughter's bravery. Some one or two great ladies of the set patronize these girls, take them about a good deal, and ask them to all their drums and at-homes. They are useful in their degree; very good-natured; always ready to fetch and carry in a confidential kind of way; to sing and play when they are asked—and they sing and play with almost professional skill; full of the small talk of the day, and not likely to bore their companions with untimely discussions on dangerous subjects, nor to startle them with enthusiasm about anything. They serve to fill a vacant place when wanted; and they look nice and keep up the ball so far as their own sphere extends. They are safe, too; and, though lively and amusing, are never known to retail gossip nor talk scandal in public.
Who are they? No one exactly knows. They are Miss A. and Miss B., and they have collaterals of respectable name and standing; cousins in Government offices; dead uncles of good military rank; perhaps a father, dead or alive, with a quite unexceptionable position; but you never see them with their natural belongings, and no one thinks of visiting them at their own homes. They are sure to have a mother in bad health, who never goes out and never sees any one; and if you should by chance come across her, you find a shabby, painful, peevish woman who seems at odds with life altogether, and who is as unlike her showy daughter as a russet wren is unlike a humming-bird. The drawing-room epiphyte introduces mamma, when necessary, with a creditable effort at indifference, not to say content, with her conditions; but if you can read signs, you know what she is feeling about that suit of rusty black, and how little she enjoys the rencounter.
Sometimes she has a brother, of whom she never speaks unless obliged, and of whose occupation and whereabouts, when asked, she gives only the vaguest account. He has an office in the City; or he has gone abroad; or he is in the navy and she forgets the name of his ship; but, whatever he is, you can get no clue more distinct than this. If you should chance to see him, you get a greater surprise than you had when you met the mother; and you wonder, with a deeper wonder, how such a sister should have sprung from the same stock as that which produced such a brother. Sometimes however, the brother is as presentable as the sister; in which case he probably follows much the same course as herself, and hangs on to the skirts of those of the Upper Ten who recognize him—preferring to idle away his life and energy as a well-dressed epiphyte of greatness rather than live the life of a man in a lower social sphere. But, as a rule, stray damsels have neither brothers nor sisters visible to the world, and only a widowed mother in the background, whose health is bad and who does not go out.
The ulterior object of the ladies who patronize these pretty epiphytes is to get them married; partly from personal kindness, partly from the pleasure all women have in bringing about a marriage that does not interfere with themselves. But they seldom accomplish this object. Who is to marry the epiphyte? The men of the society into which she has been brought from the outside have their own ambitions to realize. They want money, or land, or a good family connexion, to make the sacrifice an equal bargain and to gild the yoke of matrimony with becoming splendour. And the drawing room epiphyte has nothing to offer as her contribution but a fine pair of eyes, a good-natured manner, and a pretty taste for music. To marry well among the society in which she finds herself is therefore almost impossible. And her tastes have been so far formed as to render a marriage into lower circumstances almost as impossible on the other side.
Besides, what could she do as the wife of a clergyman, say on three hundred a year, with a poor parish to look after and an increasing tribe of babies to feed and clothe? Her clear high notes, her splendid register, her brilliant touch, will not help her then; and the taste with which she makes up half-worn silk gowns, and transforms what was a rag into an ornament, will not do much towards finding the necessary boots and loaves which keep her sisters awake at night wondering how they are to be got. She has been taught nothing of the art of home life, if she has learnt much of that of the drawing-room. She cannot cook, nor make a little go a long way by the cunning of good management and a well-masked economy; she cannot do serviceable needlework, though she may be great in fancy work, and quite a genius in millinery; and the habit of having plenty of servants about her has destroyed the habit of turning her hand to anything like energetic self-help. Epiphyte as she is, penniless stray damsel more than half maintained by the kindness of her grand friends, she has to keep up the sham of appearances before those friends' domestics. And as ladyhood in England is chiefly measured by a woman's uselessness, and to do anything in the way of rational work would be a spot on her ermine, the poor epiphyte of the drawing-room, with mamma in rusty black in those shabby lodgings of theirs, learns in self-defence to practise all the foolish helplessness of her superiors; and, to retain the respect of the servants, loses her own.
What is she then but one of those misplaced beings who are neither of one sphere nor of another? She is not of the grandes dames on her own account, yet she lives in their houses as one among them. She is not a woman who can make the best of things; who, notable and industrious, and by her clever contrivances of saving and substitution is able to order a home comfortably on next to nothing; and yet she has no solid claim to anything but the undercut of the middle classes, and no right to expect more than the most ordinary marriage. She is nothing. Ashamed and unable to work, she has to accept gratuities which are not wages. Waiting on Providence and floated by her friends, she wanders though society ever on the look-out for chances. Each new acquaintance is a fresh hope, and every house that opens to her contains the potentiality of final success. To be met everywhere is the ultimate point of her ambition with respect to means; the end kept steadily, if fruitlessly, in view, is that satisfying settlement which shall take her out of the category of a hanger-on and give her a locus standi of her own. But it does not come.
Year by year we meet the drawing-room epiphyte in the old haunts—at Brighton; at Ryde; at half-a-dozen good houses in London; on a visit to the friends who make much of her one day and snub her the next—but she does not 'go off.' She is pretty, she is agreeable, she is well dressed, she is accomplished; but she does not find the husband for whom all this is offered as the equivalent. Year by year she grows fatter or thinner as her constitution expands into obesity or shrivels into leanness; the lines about her fine eyes deepen; the powder is a little thicker on her cheeks; and there are more than shrewd suspicions of a touch of rouge or of antimony, with a judicious application of patent hair-restorer to lift up the faded tints. Fighting desperately with that old enemy Time, she disputes line by line the tribute he claims; and succeeds so far as to continue a good make-up for a year or two after other women of her own age have given in and consented to look their years. But the drawing-room epiphyte is nothing if she is not young—which is synonymous with power to interest and amuse. Her friends, the great ladies who hold drawing-rooms and gather society in shoals, want points of colour in their rooms as well as serviceable foils. The apple-pie that was all made of quinces was a failure, wanting the homely couche from which the savour of the more fragrant fruit might be thrown up. On the other hand there are social meetings which are like apple-pies without any quince at all; and then the epiphyte is invaluable, and her music worth as much in its degree as if she were a prima donna, each of whose notes ranked as gold. So that when she ceases to be young, when she loses her high notes and has gout in her fingers, she fails in her only raison d'être, and her occupation is gone. Hence her hard struggles with the old enemy, and her half-heroic, half-tragic determination not to give in while a shred of force remains.