Of all so-called civilized women, she makes the greatest variation in her treatment of those of her own and those of the other sex. Toward women she is apt to be dull, splenetic, outspoken about what she esteems the faults of others. Even the weaknesses of her husband she analyzes to their friends—herein is a fertile source of divorce. Toward women, you observe, she is apt to be metallic, rattling, and uncharitable, or possibly over-social, relieving the peccant humors of her mind and attitudinizing upon what she esteems a man’s estimate of women—to please the sex she is not of. To men she is pert, flippant, witty, caustic, rapid, graceful, and gay. At times she amuses them and herself by slurring upon other women. She seems to leave it to the man to establish the spirit upon which the two shall meet; and by deft hand and turn and movement she is constantly suggesting her eternal variation from him. The woman is always chaste. It follows that marriages are many.
A not uncommon fruit of marriage vows is an application for divorce, which she estimates with such levity and mental smack that you would hesitate to bring a young girl to her presence.
“Has she applied, do you know?”
“Oh! they’ve separated.”
“On what grounds is she going to get it?”
“If she isn’t careful she’ll lose her case by seeing him too often.”
These are a few of many such sentences heard from her lips in public places.
Nothing higher than what an ordinary civil contract seeks seems to be sought in her marital affairs. She undoes the decree of old Pope Innocent III., to whom is ascribed the ordination of marriage as a function of his church and the claim of its sanctified indissolubility. In the light of her action marriage is truly and purely a civil contract, and devoid of that grace, resignation, forbearance, patience, tenderness, sweetness, and calm which make it truly religious.
She is strong, she is hopeful, she is ardent. She knows herself and her power—that it is of the flesh which aims at prettiness. The divine beauty of spirit in the countenance she does not know. In her midst Fra Angelico would find few sitters. Her religion, commonly that which in other ages passed from a propulsive, burning spirit to frozen formalism, is the crystallized precept of theologue and priest, the fundamental ecstasy and informing soul having long since departed. If she had a real religion she could not be what she is.
Those questions of our day that shove their gaunt visages into sympathetic minds she has little knowledge of, and little of that curiosity which leads to knowledge. The fashion of her gown and the weekly relays at the theatre are nearer to her heart, and to her thinking touch her more personally, than the moral miasmata and physical typhoids of her neighboring Poverty Flat. Both pests the adjustment of her household relations brings within her door. For her dwelling is commonly domesticked by dusky shapes upon whom also the real things of life sit lightly, to whom permanence and serious thought and work are rare. Their engagement is by the week, like that of pitiful vaudeville associates, and their performance as surpassingly shallow. They come upon their stage of work, veneer their little task with clever sleight of hand, and roll off to the supine inertness and inanity of their cabin.