The wrath has come, and I find at least a dozen female gauntlets on the floor before me which I am expected to take up.
I confess I do not like anonymous gauntlets. I should like to know the antecedents of some of them before I accept the wager and do battle for my proposition.
In the first place, I would like to know how many of these pretty Amazons have had a chance to get married, and if they had a chance, then I want to know why they didn't get married. I have no more sympathy for a woman who won't get married than I have for a man. She is just as much a jug without a handle or a bow without the arrow as the man is. The very first record we have of the very first woman that ever lived, after she got her fig-leaf panier made, is of her marriage to Adam, and the next thing of any consequence is the birth of the rapscallion Cain, and the good little boy Abel. It is just as much the woman's duty to get married as the man's.
Good heavens! my dear Madame, or my dear Mademoiselle, what would you have done, if your parents hadn't got married? Would you have written me that indignant letter? Would you ever have gone to see Enoch Arden? Would you have ever known the Paradise of new fall hats and George Eliot's last new book?
I should say not.
At least it strikes me that way upon a mere glance.
Then wherein are you any better than your parents? I would like to be assured, therefore, that you have had a chance to get married, and why you refused the chance, before I answer you.
Of course I expect a very torrent of affirmation. A woman had better be dead than never to have had a chance. I would rather face a Nubian lion than tell a woman to her face that she had never had an opportunity to get married. Do not the dear, delightful old women, sitting in their arm-chairs, grow garrulous over their tea, and tell their grand-daughters of the numberless chances they had when they were young and their faces were smooth and the wrinkles and crows-feet had not been written upon their foreheads by the implacable Time? Do not mature married ladies, who have just gone round the corner, and are beginning to feel just the slightest touch in the world of neuralgia, now and then delight to give their husbands a realizing sense of their inferiority, by recalling the number of chances they have had and how they might have done better here and lived easier there? Do not young ladies in les confidences with their numerous bosom friends—confidences which are as mysterious as a sum in simple addition and as eternal as the life of a sand-fly—divulge to each other the chances they have had, and the prospects for chances ahead, with the stereotyped exactions of promises never to tell, upon penalty of immediate severance of the ties which bind, etc.? Do not the delightful little creatures from five to ten display the first sign of womanhood in getting up flirtations with the little boy in the next house, and writing the most astonishing little notes to the effect that
'If you love me as I love you,
No knife shall cut our loves in two.'
etc., etc.?