After being presented to these marvelously arrayed ladies we passed into the dining-room, where I found myself with one of the most charming of divinities, a woman famous for her wit and literary success. I have described the typical dinner, so I need not repeat my words. My companion held the same extraordinary attitude toward me that all American women do; amused, half laughing, refusing absolutely to take me seriously, and probing me with so many absurd questions that I was forced to ask some very pointed ones, which only succeeded in making her laugh. The conversation proceeded something as follows: "I am charmed that I have fallen to your Highness." "Equally charmed," I replied; "but my rank does not admit the adjective you do me the honor to apply." "No?" was the answer. "Well, I'll wager you anything that when the butler pours your wine in the first course he will call you Count, and in the next Prince. You see, they become exhilarated as the dinner progresses. But tell me, how many wives have you in China, you look very wicked?" Imagine this! But I rallied, and replied that I had none—a statement received with incredulity. Her next question was, "Have you ever been a highbinder?" Ministers of grace! and this from a people who profess to know more than any nation on earth! I explained that a highbinder ranked with a professional murderer in this country, whereupon she again laughed, and, turning to General ——, in a loud voice said, "General, I have been calling the —— a highbinder," at which the company laughed at my expense. In China, as you know, a guest or a host would have killed himself rather than commit so gross a solecism; but this is America.
The second course was oysters served in the shell, and my companion, assuming that I had never seen an oyster [ignorant that our fathers ate oysters thousands of years before America was heard of and when the Anglo-Saxon was living in a cave], in a confidential and engaging whisper remarked, "This, your 'Highness,' is the only animal we eat alive." "Why alive?" I asked, looking as innocent as possible; "why not kill them?" "Oh, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals will not permit it," was her reply. "You see, if they are swallowed alive they are immediately suffocated, but if you cut them up they suffer horribly while the soup is being served. How large a one do you think you can swallow?" Fancy the daring of a young girl to joke with a man twice her age in this way! I did not undeceive her, and allowed her to enlighten me on various subjects of contemporaneous interest. "It's so strange that the Chinese never study mathematics," she next remarked. "Why, all our public schools demand higher mathematics, and in the fourth grade you could not find a child but could square the circle."
In this manner this volatile young savage entertained me all through the dinner, utterly superficial herself, yet possessed of a singular sharpness and wit, mostly at my expense; yet she was so charming I forgave her. There is no denying that you become enraged, insulted, chagrined by these women, who, however, by a look, dispel your annoyance. I do not understand it. I found that while an author of a novel she was grossly ignorant of the literature of her own country, yet she possessed that consummate American froth by which she could convince the average person that she was brilliant to the point of scintillation. I fancy that any keen, well-educated woman must have seen that I was laughing at her, yet so inborn was her belief that a Chinaman must be an imbecile that she was ever joking at my expense. The last story she told me illustrates the peculiar fancy for joking these women possess. I had been describing a storm at Manchester-by-the-Sea and the splendor of the ocean. "Did you see the tea-leaves?" she asked, solemnly. "No," I replied. "That is strange," she said. "I fear you are not very observing. After every storm the tea-leaves still wash up all along Massachusetts Bay," alluding to the fact that loads of tea on ships were tossed over by the Americans during the quarrel with England before the Revolution.
The daring of the American woman impressed me. This same lady asked me not to remain with the men to smoke but go on the veranda with her, where tête-à-tête she produced a gold cigarette-case and offered me a cigarette. This I found not uncommon. American women of the fast sets drink at the clubs; an insidious drink—the "high-ball"—is a common one, yet I never saw a woman under the influence of wine or liquor. The amount of both consumed in America, is amazing. The consumption per head in the United States for beer alone is ten and a half gallons for each of the eighty millions. My friend, a prohibitionist, a member of a political party whose object is to ruin the wine industry of the world, put it stronger, and, backed by facts, said that if the wine, beer, whisky, gin, and alcoholic drinks of all kinds and the tea and coffee drank yearly by the Americans could be collected it would make a lake two miles square and ten feet deep. The alcoholic drinks alone if collected would fill a canal one hundred miles long, one hundred feet wide, and ten feet deep. May their saints propitiate this insatiate thirst!
It would amuse you to hear the American women of literary tendency boast of their schools, yet when educational facilities are considered the average American is ignorant. They are educated in lines. Thus a girl graduate will speak French with a good accent, or she will converse in Milwaukee German. She can prove her statement in conic sections or algebra, but when it comes to actual knowledge she is deficient. This is due to the ignorance of the teachers in the public schools and their lack of inborn culture. No better test of the futility of the American public-school education can be seen than the average girl product of the public school of the lower class in a city like Chicago or New York. Americans affect to despise Chinese methods because the Chinese girl or boy is not crammed with a thousand thoughts of no relative value. China has existed thousands of years; her people are happy; happiness and content are the chief virtues, and if China is ever overthrown it will be not because, as the Americans put it, she is behind the times, but because the fever of unrest and the craze for riches has become a contagion which will react upon her. The development of China is normal, that of America hysterical. Our growth has been along the line of peace; that of other nations has been entirely opposed to their own religious teaching, showing it to be farcical and pure sophistry.
If I should tell you how many American women asked me why Chinese women bandage their feet you would be amazed; yet every one of these submitted to and practised a deformity that has seriously affected the growth and development of the race. I am no iconoclast, but listen to the story of the American woman who, with one hand, deforms her waist in the most barbarous fashion, while waving the other in horror at her Chinese sister with the bound feet. American women change their fashions twice a year or more. Fashions are in the hands of the middle classes, and the highest lady in the land is completely at their mercy; to disobey the mandates of fashion is to become ridiculous. The fashion is set in Paris and various cities by men and women who have skilled artists to draw patterns and paint pictures showing the new mode. These are published in certain papers and issued by millions, republished in America, and no woman here would have the temerity to ignore them. The laws of the Medes and Persians are not more inexorable.
It is not a suggestion but an order, a fiat, a command, so we see this free nation really truckling to or dominated by a class of tradesmen. The object of the change of style is to create a sale for new goods, give work for laborers, and enable the producer to reach the pocketbook of the rich man; but the "fashions" have become so fixed, so thoroughly a national feature, that they affect rich and poor, and we have the spectacle of every woman studying these guides and conforming to them with a servility beyond belief. I once said to a lady, "The Chinese lady dresses richer than the American, but her styles have been very much the same for thousands of years," but I believe she doubted it. It would be futile, indeed impossible, for me to explain the extravagances of American fashion. Their own press and stage use it as a standard butt. At the present time tablets or plates of fashion insist upon an outline which shows the form completely, the antipodes of a Chinese woman; and this is intensified by some of the women who, when in the street, grasp the skirt and in an ingenious way wrap it about so that the outline of the American divinity is sufficiently well defined to startle one. Such a trick in China could but originate with the demimonde, yet it is taken up by certain of the Americans who are constantly seeking for variety. There can be no question but that the middle-class fashion designer revenges himself upon the beau monde. They will not receive him socially, so he forces them to wear his clothes.
Some years ago women were made to wear "hoops," pictures of which I have seen in old publications. Imagine, if you can, a bird-cage three feet high and four feet across, formed of bone of the whale or some metal. This was worn beneath the dress, expanding it on either side so that it was difficult to approach a lady. A later order was given to wear a camel-like "hump" at the base of the vertebral column, which was called the "bustle"—a contrivance calculated to unnerve the wearer, not to speak of the looker-on; yet the American woman adopted it, distorted her body, and aped the gait of the kangaroo, the form being called the "Grecian bend." This lasted six months or more; first adopted by the aristocracy, then by the common people, and by the time the latter had it well in hand the bon ton had cast it aside and were trying something else.