XVI. THE SOCIETY GIRL AS A WIFE.

Years ago the favorite scheme of the novelist was to demonstrate that no woman of fashion had a heart, and that girls trained in luxury and educated by the example of fashionable mothers could not possibly become good wives, especially for poor men. But is this so?

Persons born and bred in luxury have their faults, but so do persons born and bred in penury, and I do not know that one class of faults is any more tolerable or more likely to make a girl into a bad wife than the other.

The fashionable girl, for instance, has been used all her life to attendance, and probably never has learned to mend her own clothes, or to go and fetch what she wants, or to wait upon anybody else. She sees a thing in a shop, and having plenty of pocket money, or plenty of credit in her father’s name, she orders it sent home, and perhaps never looks twice at it again. If she is properly brought up she devotes most of her time and energy to study and the practice of various accomplishments, which, with necessary exercise, so fills her day that she really could not if she would learn anything of practical matters—of the art of keeping a house, of training servants or of doing without them, of buying clothes at the right time and to the best advantage, of making those clothes or so repairing and refreshing them as to

Of course if a girl so trained marries a poor man she has a great deal both to learn and to unlearn, and her capacity for these new lessons will be the measure of her ability to become a good wife.

But suppose such a girl marries a rich man? We all know, especially in this country, that money alone will not make a comfortable home; it will hire servants sometimes at tremendous wages, but the air of this free country is fatal to servitude, and the man or maid who while at home in England or Ireland was the very incarnation of obedience, respectfulness and content, only requires a few months in one of our cities, with the advantage of reading the papers before they reach the hands of the family, and of listening to the lessons of their compatriots who have been here a little longer, before they imbibe the principles of liberty and equality to such an extent, that, unless the heads of the house are well able to hold their own position, they speedily lose it, and become the servants rather than the rulers.

Now is a girl fresh from her school, or even after some years of society life, able to take and keep this position of head of a turbulent and revolutionary staff of servants simply because her husband has the money to pay them?

Of course she is not, unless she has had a mother so very unusually alive to her responsibilities that she has taught her the art of housekeeping, in addition to her school studies and the requirements of society; and such mothers are, to say the least of it, uncommon.

So our poor society girl is not by position and education fitted to become the wife either of a poor man or of a rich one.

Is she then never to be a successful wife? Are both poor men and rich men warned off from trying to appropriate her delicate loveliness and dainty grace to the embellishment of that home for which every man longs in his inmost heart?

Nay, the case is not quite as bad as this for our dear society rosebuds and half-opened blossoms. There is a teacher who can in quite a short course of most delightful lessons teach the most inexperienced girl, whether she be city bred and luxurious, or whether she be country bred and unsophisticated, to lay aside all her previous habits and to acquire a complete new set; to take up the most tedious and distasteful tasks and find them charming; to like the things she supposed she should abhor, and to grow careless of what had been her very breath of life.

His terms are high, to be sure, this wonderful teacher of ours; he demands even more than Shylock with his pound of flesh, for he is not satisfied with less than the whole being of his pupil—her heart, her brain, her hands, her feet, her will and her obedience; in fact, all that makes her herself. The teacher’s name, as you long since have guessed, is Love, dear, old, yet ever young, Dan Cupid, who has been at work among us from the day when this weary old world was as fresh and young as the débutante of yesterday.

And now the crucial question is, Can the fashionable girl, the society girl, take the course Master Love requires? She has, perhaps, “gone in” for the higher mathematics, for Greek and even Hebrew; she knows the principles of navigation, trigonometry and astronomy; she has strained her poor little brain to its utmost capacity, and is quite fit to assume the chair of mathematics at the coming college for the coming woman, but is she able to learn Love’s sweet lessons and to graduate in his school?

Those old novelists and essayists, those compounders of gilded pills who write moral tales for the young and novels with an educational purpose, in fact, all the class of theorists to whom I at first referred, say no, she can’t. They maintain that a worldly life makes the whole nature worldly; they say that artificial habits, such as sleeping half the day, and waking more than half the night, so upset and transform the natural tastes and capacities that they languish and die and are supplanted by others adapted to the new order of things. If this is true, a fashionable girl cannot learn of love any more than a blind girl could truly understand the beauty of nature, or a deaf one appreciate the chorus of birds on a summer morning.

But I, for one, am not ready to grant that this is the truth. I have seen, I have known girls trained in the lap of luxury and the vortex of fashionable life who have learned to love so truly, so purely, and so naturally that the artificial character, that seemed to be their only one, has utterly changed its complexion and build, and the pupil of Love has graduated as a wife with brilliant success. Let us look a little at the course of study.

Society teaches selfishness; the object of each individual is to surpass a little every other individual in the dearest object of ambition. With the men, this object is wealth, or political importance, or some form of worldly ambition leading to power and prominence. With the women, it is social leadership, authority in matters of dress, the reputation of entertaining with splendor and success, beauty, style, or fascinating manner, acquaintance with the mighty personages of the earth, and all the minor details of their lives.

Now the attainment of the first place in all these matters involves the pushing somebody else back into the second place, and if this is not selfishness what can be?

But Love’s first lesson is unselfishness! His pupil must learn to put herself in the background and consider what will make another person happy or be to his advantage; she must hold her own plans and wishes in so light a grasp that she can instantly relinquish them and take up another set originating in another will. She must learn to think very lightly of her own ideas and convictions, and accept with delight and admiration those she has never dreamed of or has looked upon as quite erroneous. She must learn to look upon her own beauty, grace and acquirements as only valuable because somebody else values them, and not in the least because they are her own and add to her own importance.

Yes, Love teaches unselfishness, and if one takes the full course, and acquires it thoroughly, as, alas! few have strength to do, he adds sincerity, tact, docility, silence under provocation, patience, sweetness, energy, and untiring determination to do and to be whatever will make the beloved one happy, and a holy hypocrisy in disguising all the disappointments, self-sacrifices and changes of purpose involved in giving up one’s life to become the counterpart of another life.

But where a nature is strong enough, and at the same time yielding enough, to take the whole course and learn every lesson to the end, which is also the end of life, that woman, be she a fashionable girl or a country girl, will make a good wife and become the delight and joy of her husband, although he probably will never half appreciate her, for it is one of the many contradictions of the masculine nature that the more perfect a woman is the less they admire and try to please her. A perfect woman, or one as nearly perfect as we ever find in this world of imperfection, must either be satisfied with the approval of her own sex, who do as a general thing appreciate and admire her, or, if she remains in Love’s school and faithful to his guidance, he will keep her supplied with rose-colored glasses through which not only the man she loves, but her own life and the sacrifices she makes for him, and his stolid acceptance of those sacrifices will all show in a soft radiance, a lovely Claude Lorraine effect which can transform the most stupid landscape, the most commonplace surroundings, into a scene of ideal beauty.

Civilization does not materially change the basis of human nature, and fashionable life is not half so powerful an agent for good or bad as unfashionable people are apt to think. I have known a good many men and women on both sides of the Atlantic who would no doubt be marked as leaders of society—the typical fashionable people, although, by the way, society objects just now to the term fashionable, and, especially in London, holds itself aloof from and far above those to whom it sets fashions in its own arbitrary mode. But, however you may style them, these are the people who hold themselves at the head of the social system in the great centers of civilization, and, having studied them a good deal and rather critically, I am quite ready to aver that they are just men and women like the rest of us.

The men like to fancy themselves wiser than other men, and are most charmed by those who most defer to them; they are suspicious in the wrong place, and easily binded and led by the women who know how to do it; they are highly polished on the surface, and rather coarse and material under the surface; in fact, they are like all other men. And the women love to be admired for whatever charms they pride themselves upon most highly, love to see men turn from other women to them, love to be attended to and sought out, love to be loved. This is the basis of feminine human nature, and whether it is covered up by the silks and laces of a fashionable woman, or is hidden in the folds of muslins and woolen, and the pretty devices of a girl’s own fingers and happy inventions because she has no money to buy those of other people, it is always the woman who is underneath, and who, when the man and the hour arrive, breaks forth fresh and radiant as Galatea from her marble under Pygmalion’s touch.

Do you see the kernel of the whole matter? Do you know exactly-how I reply to the question you have asked me, as to whether a fashionable life destroys the capacity for true love?

I say no, not if the original nature of the fashionable girl is capable of love. In such a one the power of love will transform the nature, and from what has seemed dead and cold, and bound in an impenetrable husk of conventionality, will evolve a sweet and gracious growth, as the flower springs from the seed that to ignorant eyes gave no promise of containing such a treasure.

But alas! some seeds are sterile; some natures have no capacity for love; some pupils go to the great master’s school and learn nothing but some parrot phrases, some poor smattering of their lesson, some imitation of what they hear their fellow pupils so joyously recite. They soon leave school, and they leave it just about as ignorant as they entered it; they have no capacity for learning, and they do not even know that there was anything more to learn than their own poor hollow phrases.

For such a pupil it does not matter whether she were bred in the lap of luxury or in the barren home of poverty; she cannot love, and so she cannot be a good wife for a poor man or a rich one. She has missed the aim of her existence, for, no matter what heights the coming woman may attain, or what power she may wield, she will never get beyond that old, old axiom, the true creed of womanhood—“The greatest thing in the world is love.”