I congratulated him on the get-up of the book, and the excellent translation. “But why,” I said, “did you put ‘Alec Tweedie’ on the volume without a prefix?”
He hummed and hawed.
“That is a man’s name,” I continued, “my husband’s name, and I am a woman.”
“That is true, Gnädige Frau, we preferred to put a man’s name on the cover. You see a big historical, biographical work like that with a woman’s name upon it would be seriously handicapped in Germany. Fifty years ago, aye, twenty years ago in England, you women were hiding your identity under the manly names of George Eliot, George Trafford, George anything. Well, we are still in that condition in Germany, not as regards novels, but as regards more serious work.”
True, O publisher, and yet with all this female emancipation, with all the Reform Kleider which stand for advancement in Germany, it really was amusing.
Five years later the girls of the Fatherland were reading risky books and taken to see risky plays, such was the rapidity with which the pendulum of ultra-propriety swung the other way.
CHAPTER X
THE END OF A CENTURY
THE close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was the subject of much notice both in drawing-room talks and articles in the papers. The latter recapitulated all that the march of science and civilisation had effected. Private persons spoke gaily or piously anent “turning over a new leaf.”