“It is quite true, my dear girl,” I should say to her, “something is wrong—very wrong. But it is not the American man. Never you mind the American man: you leave him to worry out his own salvation. You are not the girl to put him right, even where he is wrong. And it is not civilisation. Civilisation has a deal to answer for, I admit: don’t you load it up with this additional trouble. The thing that is wrong in this case of yours—if you will forgive my saying so—is you. You make a fool of yourself; you marry a man who is a mere animal because he appeals to your animal instincts. Then, like the lady who cried out ‘Alack, I’ve married a black,’ you appeal to heaven against the injustice of being mated with a clown. You are not a nice girl, either in your ideas or in your behaviour. I don’t blame you for it; you did not make yourself. But when you set to work to attract all that is lowest in man, why be so astonished at your own success? There are plenty of shocking American men, I agree. One meets the class even outside America. But nice American girls will tell you that there are also nice American men. There is an old proverb about birds of a feather. Next time you find yourself in the company of a shocking American man, you just ask yourself how he got there, and how it is he seems to be feeling at home. You learn self-control. Get it out of your head that you are the centre of the universe, and grasp the idea that a petticoat is not a halo, and you will find civilisation not half as wrong as you thought it.”
I know what Miss Sparhawk’s reply would be.
“You say all this to me—to me, a lady? Great Heavens! What has become of chivalry?”
A Frenchman was once put on trial for murdering his father and mother. He confessed his guilt, but begged for mercy on the plea that he was an orphan. Chivalry was founded on the assumption that woman was worthy to be worshipped. The modern woman’s notion is that when she does wrong she ought to be excused by chivalrous man because she is a lady.
I like the naughty heroine; we all of us do. The early Victorian heroine—the angel in a white frock, was a bore. We knew exactly what she was going to do—the right thing. We did not even have to ask ourselves, “What will she think is the right thing to do under the circumstances?” It was always the conventional right thing. You could have put it to a Sunday school and have got the answer every time. The heroine with passions, instincts, emotions, is to be welcomed. But I want her to grasp the fact that after all she is only one of us. I should like her better if, instead of demanding:
“What is wrong in civilisation? What is the world coming to?” and so forth, she would occasionally say to herself:
“Guess I’ve made a fool of myself this time. I do feel that ’shamed of myself.”
She would not lose by it. We should respect her all the more.
WHAT MRS. WILKINS THOUGHT ABOUT IT.
Last year, travelling on the Underground Railway, I met a man; he was one of the saddest-looking men I had seen for years. I used to know him well in the old days when we were journalists together. I asked him, in a sympathetic tone, how things were going with him. I expected his response would be a flood of tears, and that in the end I should have to fork out a fiver. To my astonishment, his answer was that things were going exceedingly well with him. I did not want to say to him bluntly: