Such a one is sometimes, though seldom, met in real life. But many pretenders may be encountered at Monte Carlo and other European resorts. They range from the Parisian cocotte, signalized by her chic apparel, to the fashionable divorcée who in trying her luck at the tables keeps a sharp lookout for the elderly gent with the wad, often fooled by the enterprising sport who has been there before.
These are out and out professional adventuresses. There are other adventuresses, however, than those of the story and the stage, the casino and the cabaret. The woman with the past becomes the girl with the future.
Curiously enough this latter is mainly, almost exclusively, recruited from our countrywomen, who to an abnormal passion for foreign titles join surpassing ignorance of foreign society. Thus she is ready to the hand of the Continental fortune seeker masquerading as a nobleman--occasionally but not often the black sheep of some noble family--carrying not a bona fide but a courtesy title--the count and the no-account, the lord and the Lord knows who! The Yankee girl with a dot had become before the world war a regular quarry for impecunious aristocrats and clever crooks, the matrimonial results tragic in their frequency and squalor.
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.