The American Colony is not wicked, but it would like to be thought so, which is much worse. Among some of the men it is a pose to be considered the friend of this or that particular married woman, and each of them, instead of paying the woman the slight tribute of treating her in public as though they were the merest acquaintances, which is the least the man can do, rather forces himself upon her horizon, and is always in evidence, not obnoxiously, but unobtrusively, like a pet cat or a butler, but still with sufficient pertinacity to let you know that he is there.
As a matter of fact the women have not the courage to carry out to the end these affairs of which they hint, as have the French men and women around them whose example they are trying to emulate. And, moreover, the twenty-five years of virtue which they have spent in America, as Balzac has pointed out, is not to be overcome in a day or in many days, and so they only pretend to have overcome it, and tell risqués stories and talk scandalously of each other and even of young girls. But it all begins and ends in talk, and the risqués stories, if they knew it, sound rather silly from their lips, especially to men who put them away when they were boys at boarding-school, and when they were so young that they thought it was grand to be vulgar and manly to be nasty.
It is a question whether or not one should be pleased that the would-be wicked American woman in Paris cannot adopt the point of view of the Parisian women as easily as she adopts their bonnets. She tries to do so, it is true; she tries to look on life from the same side, but she does not succeed very well, and you may be sure she is afraid and a fraud at heart, and in private a most excellent wife and mother. If it be reprehensible to be a hypocrite and to pretend to be better than one is, it should also be wrong to pretend to be worse than one dares to be, and so lend countenance to others. It is like a man who shouts with the mob, but whose sympathies are against it. The mob only hears him shout and takes courage at his doing so, and continues in consequence to destroy things. And these foolish, pretty women lend countenance by their talk and by their stories to many things of which they know nothing from experience, and so do themselves injustice and others much harm. Sometimes it happens that an outsider brings them up with a sharp turn, and shows them how far they have strayed from the standard which they recognized at home. I remember, as an instance of this, how an American art student told me with much satisfaction last summer of how he had made himself intensely disagreeable at a dinner given by one of these expatriated Americans. "I didn't mind their taking away the character of every married woman they knew," he said; "they were their own friends, not mine; but I did object when they began on the young girls, for that is something we haven't learned at home yet. And finally they got to Miss ——, and one of the women said, 'Oh, she has so compromised herself now that no one will marry her.'"
At which, it seems, my young man banged the table with his fist, and said: "I'll marry her, if she'll have me, and I know twenty more men at home who would be glad of the chance. We've all asked her once, and we're willing to ask her again."
"THE AMERICAN COLONY IS NOT WICKED"
There was an uncomfortable pause, and the young woman who had spoken protested she had not meant it so seriously. She had only meant the girl was a trifle passée and travel-worn. But when the women had left the table, one of the men laughed, and said: