And in many other essentials the girl-bachelor has the advantage of the ordinary young man. Hear what a contemporary has to say:—“The average youth, from the time he leaves school, wants unlimited tobacco for his pipes and cigarettes, and often runs to several cigars a day; he seldom passes many hours without a glass of something—wine, spirits, or beer, according to his tastes or company, and he wants a good deal of amusement of the sing-song or cheap music-hall kind, to say nothing of much more expensive meals. Tobacco would not cost him much if he were content with a little smoke when the day’s work was over, instead of indulging in perpetual cigarettes. The girl has none of these expenses; she often economises, and gives herself healthy exercise by walking at least part of the way to her occupation in fine weather; she does not smoke; she rarely eats or drinks between meals, though she may nibble a bit of chocolate, which, after all, is wholesome food; her mid-day meal seldom costs more than sixpence, and she is glad after working hours to get home, where she enjoys the welcome change of reading a book and making and mending her clothes, concocting a new hat, and so forth.”
It is a healthy, happy, often a merry, cheery life; and if the girl-bachelor often sighs to be rich, the wish is not allowed to generate discontent, but serves to arouse a wholesome ambition which may lead, in time, to the realisation of the wish. And who so happy, then, as the matured and cultured woman who reaps where she has sown, and finds, in the fullest development of her faculties the real meaning of the highest happiness, viz., living upward and outward to the whole height and breadth and depth of her innate possibilities.
THE MIDDLE-AGED CHAPERON.
The miseries of the chaperon.
Many are the miseries of the middle-aged chaperon! Is it not enough, think you, to see one’s lost youth reflected in the blithesome scene, to remember the waltzes of long ago, to recall the partners of the past, and the pleasant homage no longer forthcoming, and to feel within a response to the music and the rhythm of the dance, ridiculously incongruous with an elderly exterior, without suffering any added woes? And yet they are manifold. Draughts.There are the draughts! Windows opened for the relief of heated dancers, pour down cold airs on the uncovered shoulders of chilly chaperons. What cared they for draughts in the long-ago, when all the world was young? But now a draught is a fearsome thing. But worse, far worse, is the girl who cannot dance, who treads on her partners’ toes, and knocks against their knees, and is returned with a scowl to her wretched chaperon. “I know you are going to the Mumpshire ball,” says some one. “Would you mind taking my girl with you?” The charge who cannot dance.If she is a bad performer she is returned with astonishing alacrity and punctuality at the end of each dance; and quite perceptibly to her temporary guardian’s practised eye is the word passed round among the young men to avoid her as they would the—something. After a few dances, a sense of vicarious guilt seizes upon the chaperon. She knows the shortcomings of her charge are to be visited partly upon herself, and she anticipates the angry glare with which each man returns the young woman, and retreats in haste, malevolently eyeing the chaperon.
The reward.
And the reward? The reward is to be treated with great stiffness by the girl’s mother, and to hear that she said: “I shall never ask Mrs. What’s-her-name to take my girl to a ball again. Her own daughters danced every dance, while my poor child was left out in the cold. I think they might have introduced their partners to her.”
Romance.