The gentleman novelist, however, prances in boldly, where feminine feet well may fear to tread, and consequently has a wider scope for his writing. It is not for a woman to mingle in a barroom brawl and write of the thing as she sees it. The prize-ring, the interior of a cattle-ship, Broadway at four in the morning—these and countless other places are forbidden by her innate refinement as well as by the Ladies’ Own, and all the other aunties who have taken upon themselves the guardianship of the Home with a big H.
Fancy the outpouring of scorn upon the luckless offender’s head if one should write to the Manners and Morals Department of the Ladies’ Own as follows: “Would it be proper for a lady novelist, in search of local colour and new experiences, to accept the escort of a strange man at midnight if he was too drunk to recognise her afterward?” Yet a man in the same circumstances would not hesitate to put an intoxicated woman into a sea-going cab, and would plume himself for a year and a day upon his virtuous performance.
All things are considered proper for a man who is about to write a book. Like the disciple of Mary McLane who stole a horse in order to get the emotions of a police court, he may delve deeply not only into life, but into that under-stratum which is not spoken of, where respectable journals circulate.
Everything is fish that comes into his net. If conscientious, he may even undertake marriage in order to study the feminine personal equations at close range. Woman’s emotions, singly and collectively, are pilloried before his scientific gaze. He cowers before one problem, and one only—woman’s clothes!
Carlyle, after long and painful thought, arrives at the conclusion that “cut betokens intellect and talent; colour reveals temper and heart.”
This reminds one of the language of flowers, and the directions given for postage-stamp flirtation. If that massive mind had penetrated further into the mysteries of the subject, we might have been told that a turnover collar indicated that the woman was a High Church Episcopalian who had embroidered two altar cloths, and that suède gloves show a yielding but contradictory nature.
Clothes are, undoubtedly, indices of character and taste, as well as a sop to conventionality, but this only when one has the wherewithal to browse at will in the department store. Many a woman with ermine tastes has only a rabbit-fur pocket-book, and thus her clothes wrong her in the sight of gods and women, though men know nothing about it.
Once upon a time there was a notion to the effect that women dressed to please men, but that idea has long since been relegated to the limbo of forgotten things.
Not one man in a thousand can tell the difference between Brussels point at thirty dollars a yard, and imitation Valenciennes at ten or fifteen cents a yard which was one of the “famous Friday features in the busy bargain basement.”
But across the room, yea, even from across the street, the eagle eye of another woman can unerringly locate the Brussels point and the mock Valenciennes.