XXVI. WOMAN IN HER MOOD.

Why? is a question asked, in infinite variations, of women and about them. And the woman’s answer, as likely as not, is the proverbial woman’s reason—“Oh, because.” It is for this men call us illogical, inconsistent, inscrutable, and sometimes we admit, with ingenuous frankness, that we can’t quite understand ourselves.

Perhaps not, and yet I believe that about this mystery, like most other mysteries, there is a great deal of fiction and nonsense. Take every woman in her humor, and she is not such a complex being, after all. Woman’s caprice is man’s opportunity—that is, when he has the wit to seize it, which is by no means the rule—and as to her being a puzzle, or a bore, to herself, such a thing, even if true, would be quite unnecessary if she would but keep a judicious eye upon her own moods and tenses.

Now, let no gentle reader tremble lest I give away the secrets of the soul’s prison house and betray our sex’s natural defenses into the hands of the enemy—or, in other words, to some masculine reader who may have the intrepid curiosity to explore this page. No, indeed, not for the world. All I desire to do is to glance at the sources of those whims, humors and fickle fancies which, no doubt, are often determining factors in a woman’s life. And having accounted for these, as well as may be, I should like, if possible, to analyze them sufficiently to distinguish honest impulse from caprice, and to separate earnestness from ennui.

It is all very well to say that nature has made woman a giourette and that changing her mind is her inalienable prerogative. Fallacy! The truth is that—to reverse the old law—the woman of vapors is not born, but made. The process begins like the Chinese custom of compressing the feet in early childhood. From first to last she is removed by conventionality further and further from the healthy conditions of nature, in the matter of sleeping, for example, which, when you come to think of it, constitutes about one-third of our entire existence. The boys usually sleep alone, and perhaps have each a separate room while, partly to provide for this comfort of their brothers, and partly from mere custom, the girls are packed away two or three together, or, worse still, put to bed with their elders. Then, as they grow up, their tender little bodies are so handicapped and weighted down by all the formidable paraphernalia of the modern feminine wardrobe—the tight, high-heeled shoes, the heavy draggling skirts, the taut elastics, the innumerable pins, and heaven only knows what other devices of wire, bone, buckram and steel—that not a muscle can enjoy its free, flexible movement, while the nerves are “set on edge,” and every movement is painfully distorted. Of course, a cramped body breeds warped ideas and a narrow mind. Then, the physical freedom, exercise, amusements and recuperative hygiene under which men develop and thrive, are for the most part denied to women, if only by reason of costume and conventionality. Even the out-door sports, which a broadening civilization at last consents to regard as not unbecoming ladies, they can seldom enjoy independently and by themselves. The Turkish and Russian baths are mostly for the luxurious few who can afford them as home accessories. Such solace as tobacco may afford is forbidden them, although every argument in its favor for men would apply with tenfold force to the mercurial and high-strung temperament of womankind.

Under these conditions, is it any wonder if a woman is “uncertain, coy and hard to please;” that she should sometimes say no when she means yes, or that she should reconsider a thing two or three times with baffling suddenness and with diametrically opposite conclusions? The fact is, she is chained to the traditional rock of physical discomfort and moral oppression, and welcomes with desperate eagerness the first knight errant who shows a disposition to set her free. When such an opportunity does come along, and she has the courage or recklessness to accept it, regardless of worldly considerations, she is pointed out as an extreme case of the whimsical folly known to be characteristic of her sex.

Most Europeans who visit this country, as Messrs. Max O’Rell and Paul Bourget have done, with the gracious purpose of telling us all about ourselves, declare that here is the earthly paradise of womankind. Cherchez la femme with us, they say, and you find her upon a pedestal, fêted and caressed, the object of something like a chivalric devotion.

They might have added that too often she is spoiled. Really, to be killed with kindness is not an enviable destiny. We have just been considering the case of those who are crochety merely from physical exasperation and the petty material annoyances of life. There is another class, perhaps larger still, whose morbid moods arise from conditions exactly the reverse—that is to say—from an excess of effete comfort, if not of idle luxury, and a woeful lack of both physical and mental occupation. These are the easy prey of the demon Ennui.

The philosopher (pessimistic) hath said want and ennui are the two poles of human life. The further we are removed from the one, the nearer we approach the other. A woman with every material want provided for, with nothing to “worry” about and everything to enjoy, and whose future is one long unbroken perspective of flowery ease, is indeed to be pitied. Having no real emotions to exaggerate, she falls back upon imaginary ones, and these, when once allowed to gain control, are the most tyrannical of evil genii. They drive a woman, through the very defects of her qualities of heart and impulse, to the most extreme inconsistencies. They induce fits of morbid personal vanity, in which il faut souffrir pour être belle and then suffer more because beauty is not attained—or, being attained, is ineffective. They make her a ridiculous malade imaginaire. They awaken a supersensitive conscience, or perhaps violent religious fervor, which expresses itself in all sorts of misdirected charities and superfluous zeal. Again, these sham emotions find expression in a series of capricious yet demonstrative friendships with individuals of her own sex—friendships as short-lived and tempestuous as they are capricious. These, and a hundred similar humors, are bred of ennui, pure and simple. And herein, if I may venture to suggest it without indiscretion, lies the clew to the restlessness and impatience which are summed up at the present day under the general head of “the new womanhood.”

But, caprice and ennui aside, it is in love that the innate and incorrigible humors, the legendary inconsistency and caprice of womanhood most strikingly assert themselves. “She is a woman, therefore to be wooed,” and according to the mere accidents of the wooing, or because the sky is so blue on a certain day, she takes long chances with fate. Many a modern marriage, not particularly unhappy in itself, is dissolved as it was contracted—with insouciant good will, or at worst indifference, on both sides. Other marriages, ill devised and thoroughly wretched, are stuck to through thick and thin merely from bravado or false pride. What a confessional it would be if men and women were to tell with frank unreserve their precise reasons for marrying! Many, of course, have an eye to material welfare and advancement. Some men marry from a sense of duty, and not a few women from mere curiosity.

Tennyson’s “Lord of Burleigh”—the story of a rich nobleman who, in the disguise of a landscape painter, courted and won a simple village maiden, who was eunuyée to death when she found out the deception—is based upon absolute fact. The belle of a dozen seasons, rich, beautiful, sought after, refuses the élite of marriageable parties in two hemispheres, and then at a day’s notice weds an impoverished Bohemian, simply because she is touched at observing, during the dance, that the elbows of his coat sleeve are frayed and shiny from assiduous (and presumably ill-requitted) desk work! Why do they do it? Why does the wind change?

Such moods in woman have ever been and doubtless must always be regarded as the out-cropping of deep and divine instincts. At any rate, there they are, and what better course than to study and chart them, even as the multitudinous seas? In this connection, evidently, the proper study of mankind is woman.

One of the most moving historiettes of the late unfortunate Guy de Maupassant was entitled, if I remember rightly, “Remorse.” It related the despairing love of a man who worshipped from afar a splendid creature of the gay world, in which both laughed and sighed away their youth. It was only after many years, when both had grown old, saddened and sedate, that he ventures to declare the passion of his prime. “Would you,” he asks fervently in a momentary fanning of the old flame—“would you on a certain night which we both remember well, have listened to the declaration which I make you now, and what would have been your answer?” She replies, simply, “My answer would have been, Yes, with all my heart.” Ah, and it is now too late!

A woman’s humors, then, are somewhat like the Sphinx’s riddle. But here let the simile stop short. For not only is the woman herself the riddle, easy enough for him who has the heart to try, but she is also the prize to be won in the successful solution.