ON THE SUBJECT OF HUSBANDS
"All that I am, my mother made me"
Perhaps you think that girls do not know enough about other girls' husbands to discuss them with any profit. But if there has been a dinner or theatre party within our memory where the married girls did not take the bachelors and leave their husbands for us, we would just like to know when it was, that's all.
I dare say it never occurred to these wives what an opportunity this custom gives us to study social problems at close range. We girls are supposed to be blind and deaf and dumb; but we are none of the three. We try to see all there is to see, and hear all there is to hear, and then, when we get together, we wouldn't be human if we didn't talk it over and tell each other how infinitely better we could manage Jessie's husband than she does, and that it seems a pity that Carrie doesn't understand George.
I suppose it would be rather handsome of us always to pretend that we did not hear the covert rebuke or the open sarcasm bandied about between these husbands and wives. On the whole, I think it would be chivalrous for us to be utterly oblivious, and talk about the weather, if anybody asked us if we knew that Mary never could spend a cent without having John ask her what she did with it.
That is the way men do when they do not wish to tell on each other. I think men are fine in that way. We girls all think so, only we seldom have the moral courage to emulate their admirable example. We are so fond of "talking things over." And if the married women do not wish us to talk their husbands over, just let them give us our own rightful property, the bachelors, and we will never utter another cheep.
However, I would not give up my small experience with other girls' husbands for a great deal. It has convinced me of something of which I always have been reasonably sure, and that is that American men make the best husbands in the world, and that women who cannot get along with Americans, and who think men of another race, who have more polish, more finesse, more veneer, would suit them better, could not manage to live happily with the Angel Gabriel.
Dear me! If these dissatisfied American wives could only realize that an all-wise Providence had, in the American man, given us the best article in the market, and that when we rebel at our lot we are simply proving that we do not deserve our good fortune, they would never even discuss the subject of having men of any other nationality.
Of course, in every nation there is a class of men who are as noble, as high-minded, as chivalrous as even the most captious American girl could wish. But I refer to the general run of men when I say that there is something about men born outside of America, a native selfishness or callousness, a lack of perception and appreciation of the fineness of womanhood, amounting to a sort of mental brutality, which wellnigh unfits them for close social contact with the super-sensitive American woman. And just as surely as American women persist in disregarding this subtle yet unmistakable truth, just so surely will they lay themselves open to these soul-bruises from foreign husbands which American men, as a race, are incapable of inflicting. I say they are incapable of inflicting them, because American men, in the face of everything said and written to the contrary, are, in regard to women, the finest-grained race of men in the world.
Now in this generalizing, I beg that you will not accuse me of asserting that these strictures are true of every man who is not an American, or that all American men are perfect. But I do wish to state clearly and frankly my admiration for American men as a race. When an American man is a gentleman, he is to my mind the most perfect gentleman that any race can produce, because his good manners spring from his heart, and there are a few of us old-fashioned enough to plead that politeness should go deeper than the skin.