'It proceeds purely,' said Lady Violet Greville, 'from a wish to imitate; it is vulgarity pure and simple.
'It is the aspiration after gentility, the longing to appear what we are not, the desire of the fly for the dinner-lamp.
'It is the natural consequence of the religion of the Anglo-Saxon race—make-believe.
'A real lady's existence,' continues her ladyship, 'seems to outsiders to be all sweetness, and passed in a land of milk and honey; whereas, in reality, could her poor, crawling admirers realize it, the modern lady's life is a compound of hard work, exhausting excitement, anxious ease, and infinite disillusion. To begin with, she is often poorer than her prosperous neighbour, compelled to practise petty and galling economies, travel second class, wear cleaned gloves, and spend unpleasant moments in street-cars and omnibuses. It is the vulgar nouveaux riches who own the carriages, the horses, the jewels, and the money.'
Yet the vulgar rich may be as lavish as they please, may throw gold out of the windows, give a small fortune for their horses and carriages, they have not enough money to buy what that lady possesses, her delicacy and refinement. Even their servants know that, for they can take the measure of the mushroom nobility to a T.
In a few years more, no doubt, the word 'lady,' entirely divested of the original meaning, far away buried in the mists of time, will merely be the equivalent of the feminine gender, the female of the male, and then the gentler bred and wiser of the sex will exult in bravely calling themselves women. And they will be right. 'A perfect woman' sounds to my ears far more sweetly than 'a perfect lady.' There is no misunderstanding about the former. 'I am not an angel,' says an ingénue to her fiancé in some French play, the name of which now escapes me; 'don't expect too much from me. I am only a woman.' A woman—only a woman. Heavens! that is good enough for anybody!
Lady Violet Greville concludes her clever article by a beautiful definition of a lady:
'The real lady settles her debts, does not forget her liabilities, would as soon cheat as commit murder, and actually considers an engagement a binding duty. She has a soft voice and a pleasant manner; she is the daughter of evolution and the survival of the fittest. If she has nerves, she does not show them. She has courage of the finest sort, the courage of her opinions and the moral courage to deny herself.'
I feel almost inclined to draw myself up, and say of the real lady: 'In short, she possesses all the qualities that make up a gentleman.'
Tell me, ladies, if this is not just like a man.