On the day when she collapses into an old woman she is lost. She has nothing for it then but to withdraw from the brilliant drawing-rooms she has so long haunted into dingy lodgings in a back street, and live as her mother lived before her. Forgotten by the world which she has spent her life in waiting on, she has leisure to reflect on the relative values of things, and to lament, as she probably will, that she gave living grain for gilded husks; that she exchanged the realities of love and home, which might have been hers had she been contented to accept them on a lower social scale, for the barren pleasures of the day and the delusive hope of marrying well in a sphere where she had no solid foothold. She had her choice, like others; but she chose to throw for high stakes at heavy odds, and in so doing let slip what she originally held. The bird in the hand might have been of a homely kind enough; still, it was always the bird; while the two golden pheasants in the bush flew away unsalted, and left her only their shadows to run after.
On the whole then, we incline to the belief that the drawing-room epiphyte is a mistake, and that those stray damsels who wander about society unattended by any natural protector and always more or less in the character of adventuresses, would do better to keep to the sphere determined by parental circumstances than to let themselves be taken into one which does not belong to them and which they cannot hold. And furthermore it seems to us that, irrespective of its present instability and future fruitlessness, the position of a drawing-room epiphyte is one which no woman of sense would accept, and to which no woman of spirit would submit.
THE EPICENE SEX.
There has always been in the world a kind of women whom one scarcely knows how to classify as to sex; men by their instincts, women by their form, but neither men nor women as we regard either in the ideal. In early times they were divided into two classes; the Amazons who, donning helmet and cuirass, went to the wars that they might be with their lovers, or perhaps only for an innate liking for rough work; and the tribe of ancient women, so withered and so wild, who should be women yet whose beards forbade men so to account them, and for whom public opinion usually closed the controversy by declaring that they were witches—that is, creatures so unlike the rightful woman of nature that only the devil himself was supposed to be answerable for them. These particular manifestations have long since passed away, and we have nowadays neither Amazons learning the goose-step in our barrack-yards, nor witches brewing hell-broth on Scottish moors; but we have the Epicene Sex all the same—women who would defy the acutest social Cuvier among us to classify, but who are growing daily into more importance and making continually fresh strides in their unwholesome way.
Possessed by a restless discontent with their appointed work, and fired with a mad desire to dabble in all things unseemly, which they call ambition; blasphemous to the sweetest virtues of their sex, which until now have been accounted both their own pride and the safeguard of society; holding it no honour to be reticent, unselfish, patient, obedient, but swaggering to the front, ready to try conclusions in aggression, in selfishness, in insolent disregard of duty, in cynical abasement of modesty, with the hardest and least estimable of the men they emulate;—these women of the doubtful gender have managed to drop all their own special graces while unable to gather up any of the more valuable virtues of men. They are no more philosophical than the most inconsequent sister who judges all things according to her feelings, and commends or condemns principles as she happens to like or dislike the persons advocating them; and they are as hysterical and intemperate in their political cries as if the whole world wagged by impulse only. They are no more magnanimous under rebuke than the stanchest advocate of the sacredness of sex, but resent all hostile criticism as passionately, and from grounds as merely personal, as if they were still shrouded from public blame by the safety of their privacy; and they are as little useful in their blatant energy as when they spent their days in working monstrous patterns in crude-coloured wools, or found spiritual satisfaction in cutting holes in strips of calico to sew up again with a new stitch. They have committed the mistake of abandoning such work as they can do well, while trying to manipulate things which they touch only to spoil; they have ceased to be women and not learnt to be men; they have thrown aside beauty and not put on strength.
The latest development of the impulses which animate the epicene sex has taken its expression in after-dinner oratory. If we were as malicious to women as those whose follies we rebuke would have the world believe, we should encourage them to fight it out with womanly modesty and the world's esteem on this line. Their worst enemies could not wish to see them inflict on themselves a greater annoyance than the obligation of getting on their legs after the cheese has been removed, to turn on a stream of verbal insipidity for a quarter of an hour at a stretch. Only men who have something to say on the subject that may be on hand, and so are glad of every opportunity for elucidation or advocacy, or men who are eaten up with vanity, take pleasure in speechifying after dinner. Its uselessness is apparent; its mock hilarity is ghastly; even at political 'banquets,' when words are supposed to have some deep meaning, we get very little substance in it; while all the funny part of the business is the dreariest comedy, the unreality of which brings it close to tragedy.
If anything were wanting to show how much vanity prompts a certain class of women in their ways and works, and how tremendous is their passion for notoriety and personal display, it would be this assumption of the functions of the post-prandial orator. Indeed they have taken greatly of late to public speaking all round; and some among them seem only easy when they are standing before a crowd, to be admired if they are pretty, applauded if they are pert, and, in any case, the centre of attraction for the moment. We do not look forward with pleasure to the time when ladies will rise after their champagne and port, with flushed cheeks and eyes more bright than beautiful, steadying themselves adroitly against the back of their chairs, and rolling out either those interminable periods with no nominatives and no climax under which we have all so often suffered, or spasmodically jerking forth a few unconnected sentences of which the sole merit is their brevity. In the beginning of things, when the wedge has to be introduced, only the best of its kind puts itself forward; and doubtless the ladies who have already varied the usual dull routine of after-dinner oratory by their livelier utterances have done the thing comparatively well, and avoided a breakdown; but we own that we tremble at the thought of the flood of feminine eloquence which will be let loose if the fashion spreads.
Fancy the heavy British matron rearing her ample shoulders above the board, as she lays down the law on the duties of men towards women—especially sons-in-law—and the advantage to all concerned if wives are liberally dealt with in the matter of housekeeping money, and let to go their own way without marital hindrance. Or think of the woman's-rights woman, with her hybrid costume and her hard face, showing society how it can be saved from destruction only by throwing the balance of power into the hands of women—by the nobler and brighter instincts of the oppressed sex swamping that rude, rough, masculine element which has so long mismanaged matters. Or even think of the coquettish and alluring little woman getting up before a crowd of men and firing off the neatest and smartest park of verbal artillery possible, every shot of which tells and is applauded to the echo. How will men take it all? For ourselves, having too sincere a respect for women as they ought to be, and as nature meant them to be, we do not wish to see them turned into social buffoons, the mark for jeering comments and angry hisses when what they say displeases their hearers, told to 'sit down,' and 'shut up,' with entreaties to some strong man to 'take them out of that and carry them home to the nursery,' by a hundred voices roughened with drink and shouting. But if women expect that hostile feelings and opinions will be tamed or altogether suppressed in their honour because they choose to thrust themselves where they have no business, they will find out their mistake, perhaps when too late. If they abandon their safe cover and come out into the open, they must look to be hit like the rest. We cannot too often repeat that if they will mingle in the specialities of men's lives, they must put up with men's treatment and not cry out when they are struck home. In deference to them plain-speaking has been banished from the drawing rooms of society; but it is too much to expect men to sit in their own places under heavy boredom or fatuous gabble without wincing; and it is childish to ask us to make a free-gift of our truth and time to women who outrage one and waste the other. On the other hand the cheers which would follow if they hit the humour of the hour, or if, being specially pretty or specially smart, they afforded so much more than the ordinary excitement to the guests, would to our minds be just as offensive as the rougher truth, and perhaps more so. The leering approbation of men never over-nice in thought and now heated with wine, such as are always to be found at public dinners, is an infliction from which we should have imagined any woman with purity or self-respect would have shrunk with shame and dismay. But women who take to after-dinner speeches cannot be either nervous or fastidious.