As I watch, year after year, the flowers of our aristocratic
hothouses blooming behind the glass partitions of their
conservatories, tended always by the same gardeners, admired by
the same amateurs, and then, for the most part, withering
unplucked on their virgin stems, I wonder if the wild flowers
appreciate the good luck that allows them to taste the storm and
the sunshine untrammelled and disperse perfume according to their
own sweet will.
To drop a cumbersome metaphor, there is not the shadow of a
doubt that the tamest and most monotonous lives in this country
are those led by the women in our “exclusive” sets,
for the good reason that they are surrounded by all the trammels
of European society without enjoying any of its benefits, and
live in an atmosphere that takes the taste out of existence too
soon.
Girls abroad are kept away from the “world”
because their social life only commences after marriage. In
America, on the contrary, a woman is laid more or less on the
shelf the day she becomes a wife, so that if she has not made hay
while her maiden sunshine lasted, the chances are she will have
but meagrely furnished lofts; and how, I ask, is a girl to
harvest always in the same field?
When in this country, a properly brought up young aristocrat
is presented by her mamma to an admiring circle of friends, she
is quite a blasée person. The dancing classes
she has attended for a couple of years before her début
(that she might know the right set of youths and maidens) have
taken the bloom off her entrance into the world. She and
her friends have already talked over the “men” of
their circle, and decided, with a sigh, that there were matches
going about. A juvenile Newporter was recently overheard
deploring (to a friend of fifteen summers), “By the time we
come out there will only be two matches in the market,”
meaning, of course, millionnaires who could provide their brides
with country and city homes, yachts, and the other appurtenances
of a brilliant position. Now, the unfortunate part of the
affair is, that such a worldly-minded maiden will in good time be
obliged to make her début, dine, and dance through a dozen
seasons without making a new acquaintance. Her migrations
from town to seashore, or from one country house to another, will
be but changes of scene: the actors will remain always the
same. When she dines out, she can, if she cares to take the
trouble, make a fair guess as to who the guests will be before
she starts, for each entertainment is but a new shuffle of the
too well-known pack. She is morally certain of being taken
in to dinner by one of fifty men whom she has known since her
childhood, and has met on an average twice a week since she was
eighteen.
Of foreigners such a girl sees little beyond a stray
diplomatist or two, in search of a fortune, and her glimpses of
Paris society are obtained from the windows of a hotel on the
Place Vendôme. In London or Rome she may be presented
in a few international salons, but as she finds it difficult to
make her new acquaintances understand what an exalted position
she occupies at home, the chances are that pique at seeing some
Daisy Miller attract all the attention will drive my lady back to
the city where she is known and appreciated, nothing being more
difficult for an American “swell” than explaining to
the uninitiated in what way her position differs from that of the
rest of her compatriots.
When I see the bevies of highly educated and attractive girls
who make their bows each season, I ask myself in wonder,
“Who, in the name of goodness, are they to
marry?”
In the very circle where so much stress is laid on a
girl’s establishing herself brilliantly, the fewest
possible husbands are to be found. Yet, limited as such a
girl’s choice is, she will sooner remain single than accept
a husband out of her set. She has a perfectly distinct idea
of what she wants, and has lived so long in the atmosphere of
wealth that existence without footmen and male cooks, horses and
French clothes, appears to her impossible. Such large
proportions do these details assume in her mind that each year
the husband himself becomes of less importance, and what he can
provide the essential point.
If an outsider is sufficiently rich, my lady may consent to
unite her destinies to his, hoping to get him absorbed into her
own world.
It is pathetic, considering the restricted number of eligible
men going about, to see the trouble and expense that parents take
to keep their daughters en évidence. When one
reflects on the number of people who are disturbed when such a
girl dines out, the horses and men and women who are kept up to
convey her home, the time it has taken her to dress, the cost of
the toilet itself, and then see the man to whom she will be
consigned for the evening,—some bored man about town who
has probably taken her mother in to dinner twenty years before,
and will not trouble himself to talk with his neighbor, or a
schoolboy, breaking in his first dress suit,—when one
realizes that for many maidens this goes on night after night and
season after season, it seems incredible that they should have
the courage, or think it worth their while to keep up the
game.
The logical result of turning eternally in the same circle is
that nine times out of ten the men who marry choose girls out of
their own set, some pretty stranger who has burst on their jaded
vision with all the charm of the unknown. A conventional
society maiden who has not been fortunate enough to meet and
marry a man she loves, or whose fortune tempts her, during the
first season or two that she is “out,” will in all
probability go on revolving in an ever-narrowing circle until she
becomes stationary in its centre.
In comparison with such an existence the life of the average
“summer girl” is one long frolic, as varied as that
of her aristocratic sister is monotonous. Each spring she
has the excitement of selecting a new battle-ground for her
manœuvres, for in the circle in which she moves, parents
leave such details to their children. Once installed in the
hotel of her choice, mademoiselle proceeds to make the
acquaintance of an entirely new set of friends, delightful youths
just arrived, and bent on making the most of their brief
holidays, with whom her code of etiquette allows her to sail all
day, and pass uncounted evening hours in remote corners of piazza
or beach.
As the words “position” and “set” have
no meaning to her young ears, and no one has ever preached to her
the importance of improving her social standing, the
acquaintances that chance throws in her path are accepted without
question if they happen to be good-looking and amusing. She
has no prejudice as to standing, and if her supply of partners
runs short, she will dance and flirt with the clerk from the desk
in perfect good humor—in fact, she stands rather in awe of
that functionary, and admires the “English” cut of
his clothes and his Eastern swagger. A large hotel is her
dream of luxury, and a couple of simultaneous flirtations her
ideal of bliss. No long evenings of cruel boredom, in order
to be seen at smart houses, will cloud the maiden’s career,
no agonized anticipation of retiring partnerless from cotillion
or supper will disturb her pleasure.
In the city she hails from, everybody she knows lives in about
the same style. Some are said to be wealthier than others,
but nothing in their way of life betrays the fact; the art of
knowing how to enjoy wealth being but little understood outside
of our one or two great cities. She has that tranquil sense
of being the social equal of the people she meets, the absence of
which makes the snob’s life a burden.
During her summers away from home our “young
friend” will meet other girls of her age, and form
friendships that result in mutual visiting during the ensuing
winter, when she will continue to add more new names to the long
list of her admirers, until one fine morning she writes home to
her delighted parents that she has found the right man at last,
and engaged herself to him.
Never having penetrated to those sacred centres where birth
and wealth are considered all-important, and ignoring the supreme
importance of living in one set, the plan of life that such a
woman lays out for herself is exceedingly simple. She will
coquette and dance and dream her pleasant dream until Prince
Charming, who is to awaken her to a new life, comes and kisses
away the dew of girlhood and leads his bride out into the
work-a-day world. The simple surroundings and ambitions of
her youth will make it easy for this wife to follow the man of
her choice, if necessary, to the remote village where he is
directing a factory or to the mining camp where the foundations
of a fortune lie. Life is full of delicious possibilities
for her. Men who are forced to make their way in youth
often turn out to be those who make “history” later,
and a bride who has not become prematurely blasée
to all the luxuries or pleasures of existence will know the
greatest happiness that can come into a woman’s life, that
of rising at her husband’s side, step by step, enjoying his
triumphs as she shared his poverty.
