Lacking simplicity this woman is submerged in artificiality and false conceptions of life values. Her hair, often blondined and curled in fluffy ringlets, is filleted with gold-mounted combs above a countenance fine-featured and a trifle hardened. Her well-formed hands, even in daily comings and goings, are flashing with rings. She loves to turn the precious stones and watch them divide the light. These jewels are her first expression of accumulating wealth—these and the pelts of animals difficult to capture, and therefore costly. After obtaining these insignia of opulence she begins to long for a third—the gentle, inept riot and solitary Phorcides’s eye for seeing life which she calls “society.”
The voice is an unconscious index of one’s spiritual tone; hers is metallic. At times it is deep, with a masculine note and force. The gift of flexible English speech, belonging to her by the right of inheritance of every American—she is at times of the old American stock, but more often of foreign-born parents,—she is apt to wrap in stereotyped phrases or newspaper slang. In her bustling life, formed, stamped, and endowed in spirit by an iron-grooved, commercial world, she gives little consideration to use of the greatest of all instruments and the mightiest of all arts. She has not the instinct of attention to her mother tongue which marks women of fine breeding.
The best thing made by man—good books—she has little love for. The newspaper and to-day’s flimsy novel of adventure stand in their stead. There were times when her reading had the illuminating calm of Milton’s “Penseroso” and the buoyant freshness of Shakespeare’s comedies. But that was when the rosy morning of her life stood on the mountain-top of school-girl idealism and looked not at things near by, but afar—a period not long when compared to the jaded vacuity of later years.
To this shapely woman a writer is presented as “the highest paid lady-writer in the world.” The highest paid! Where, then, is literature, O Milton, with thy ten pounds for “Paradise Lost,” and eight more from Printer Simmons to thy widow! Where, O immortal writer of the simplicities of Wakefield, apprenticed in thy poverty to Publisher Newberry! Where, then, singer and gauger Robert Burns! “Learning,” says Thomas Fuller, in his “Holy States,” “learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.”
This woman is fair and seemly. When you look upon her you think how full of strength and well-knit is her body. You foresee her the mother of strong and supple children. She is graceful as she moves—a result of her freedom and a sign of her strength—and she is mistress of the occasion always. In this domination (the right of the domina) she has, even when unmarried and as early as in her teens, the poise and solidity of the matron. She scorns your supposition that she is not informed in every worldly line, and that the wavering hesitancy of the one who does not know could be hers. She rarely blushes, and is therefore a negative witness to Swift’s hard-cut apophthegm—
“A virtue but at second-hand;
They blush because they understand.”
Although conventional, she is often uninstructed in petty distinctions and laws which of late more and more growingly have manacled the hands, fettered the feet, and dwarfed the folk of our democracy; and which threaten that plasticity which, it is claimed, is the great characteristic of life. “It is quite possible,” says Clifford in his “Conditions of Mental Development,” “for conventional rules of action and conventional habits of thought to get such power that progress is impossible.... In the face of such danger it is not right to be proper.”
Secretly our St. Louis neighbor, like most women, subjects herself to
“the chill dread sneer
Conventional, the abject fear
Of form-transgressing freedom.”
Openly she often passes it by and remarks, rocking her chair a trifle uneasily, that she is as good as anybody else. For some unspoken reason you never ask her if every one else is as good as she. You recall what de Tocqueville wrote eighty years ago: “If I were asked to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that [American] people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply—to the superiority of their women.”