Another curious circumstance is the readiness with which the American newspaper tumbles to these frauds. The yellow press especially luxuriates in them; woodcuts the callow bedizened bride, the jaded game-worn groom; dilates upon the big money interchanged; glows over the tin-plate stars and imaginary garters and pinchbeck crowns; and keeping the pictorial paraphernalia in cold but not forgotten storage waits for the inevitable scandal, and then, with lavish exaggeration, works the old story over again.
These newspapers ring all the sensational changes. Now it is the wondrous beauty with the cool million, who, having married some illegitimate of a minor royal house, will probably be the next Queen of Rigmarolia, and now—ever increasing the dose—it is the ten-million-dollar widow who is going to marry the King of Pontarabia’s brother, and may thus aspire to be one day Empress of Sahara.
Old European travelers can recall many funny and sometimes melancholy incidents—episodes—histories—of which they have witnessed the beginning and the end, carrying the self-same dénouement and lesson.
IV
As there are women and women there are many kinds of adventuresses; not all of them wicked and detestable. But, good or bad, the lot of the adventuress is at best a hard lot. Be she a girl with a future or a woman with a past she is still a woman, and the world can never be too kind to its women—the child bearers, the home makers, the moral light of the universe as they meet the purpose of God and Nature and seek not to thwart it by unsexing themselves in order that they may keep step with man in ways of self-indulgent dalliance. The adventuress of fiction always comes to grief. But the adventuress in real life—the prudent adventuress who draws the line at adultery—the would-be leader of society without the wealth—the would-be political leader without the masculine fiber—is sure of disappointment in the end.
Take the agitation over Suffragism. What is it that the woman suffragette expects to get? No one of them can, or does, clearly tell us.
It is feminism, rather than suffragism, which is dangerous. Now that they have it, my fear is that the leaders will not stop with the ballot for women. They are too fond of the spotlight. It has become a necessity for them. If all women should fall in with them there would be nothing of womanhood left, and the world bereft of its women will become a masculine harlotocracy.
Let me repeat that I have been fighting woman’s battles in one way and another all my life. I am not opposed to Votes for Women. But I would discriminate and educate, and even at that rate I would limit the franchise to actual taxpayers, and, outside of these, confine it to charities, corrections and schools, keeping woman away from the dirt of politics. I do not believe the ballot will benefit woman and cannot help thinking that in seeking unlimited and precipitate suffrage the women who favor it are off their reckoning! I doubt the performances got up to exploit it, though somehow, when the hikers started from New York to Albany, and afterward from New York to Washington, the inspiring thought of Bertha von Hillern came back to me.
I am sure the reader never heard of her. As it makes a pretty story let me tell it. Many years ago—don’t ask me how many—there was a young woman, Bertha von Hillern by name, a poor art student seeking money enough to take her abroad, who engaged with the management of a hall in Louisville to walk one hundred miles around a fixed track in twenty-four consecutive hours. She did it. Her share of the gate money, I was told, amounted to three thousand dollars.
I shall never forget the closing scenes of the wondrous test of courage and endurance. She was a pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized, but shapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without much diminution, though with intermittent changes, had watched her from start to finish, began to grow tense with the approach to the end, and the last hour the enthusiasm was overwhelming. Wave upon wave of cheering followed every footstep of the plucky girl, rising to a storm of exultation as the final lap was reached.