Her ancestress
Twenty years ago this girl was the girl who wished she was a boy. It is one of the changes which time has wrought in her case that she no longer wishes that. She is happy and proud to be a girl of to-day, believing, as she does, that girls and women never had a chance to distinguish themselves in feats of strength till to-day. Remind her of Joan of Arc, and she will reply that that was an isolated case; draw her attention to the passage in Motley’s Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic, referring to the garrison of Haarlem in 1572, and she will stare. The passage in question runs—
“The garrison at least numbered one thousand pioneers or delvers, three thousand fighting men, and about three hundred fighting women. This last was a most efficient corps, all females of respectable character, armed with sword, musket, and dagger. Their chief, Frau Kenau Hasselaer, was a widow of distinguished family and unblemished character, about forty-seven years of age, who, at the head of her Amazons, participated in many of the most fiercely contested actions of the siege, both within and without the walls.”
Elegance of speech is not, as a rule, a primary characteristic of the athletic girl, and it has been noticed that, while she prefers the use of any name to that of the baptismal or family one, she usually goes to the brute creation for a substitute, selecting—in so far merciful—the names of the pleasantly associated animals commonly called domestic. Thus ass, goose, duck, pig, cart-horse, cow, and—lately at the zenith of its popularity with her—hound, are all of her word-treasure. It is to be expected that she will add to this list in the course of time “barn-fowl,” and some other, and that, when she has exhausted the names belonging to the domestic animals, she will have recourse to those placarded at the Zoo. It does not seem probable that she will ever be guilty of the banality attaching to the use of Christian names alone.
As a letter-writer the average athletic girl does not shine. First, as for her handwriting, it is perhaps best described in some words which Goldsmith gives to Tony Lumpkin—
“Here are such handles and shanks and dashes that one can scarcely know the head from the tail.”
The speed at which she writes, too, is productive of direful blunders of the kind of Dear Madman for “Dear Madam”; and the “burst of speaking,” to use a phrase from Shakespeare, which characterises her vivâ voce manner, has its effect upon her epistolary style. It lacks repose. Another detracting feature of it is connected with the fact that this type of girl affects insensibility just as her ancestresses of a hundred years ago affected sensibility. There is scarce a whit to choose between them in their affectations.
It is not that the athletic girl has no heart. There follows here her description of a parting scene in which she was one of two.
“I made an owl of myself, got the gulps, and could not even say good-bye.”