A Little Journey in the World. Charles Dudley Warner

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СКАЧАТЬ very familiar to the public in connection with a certain Congressional investigation—was a graduate of my own college, a New Hampshire boy, a lawyer by profession, who practiced, as so many American lawyers do, in Wall Street, in political combinations, in Washington, in railways. He was already known as a rising man.

      When I returned Mr. Lyon was still at our house. I understood that my wife had persuaded him to extend his visit—a proposal he was little reluctant to fall in with, so interested had he become in studying social life in America. I could well comprehend this, for we are all making a “study” of something in this age, simple enjoyment being considered an unworthy motive. I was glad to see that the young Englishman was improving himself, broadening his knowledge of life, and not wasting the golden hours of youth. Experience is what we all need, and though love or love-making cannot be called a novelty, there is something quite fresh about the study of it in the modern spirit.

      Mr. Lyon had made himself very agreeable to the little circle, not less by his inquiring spirit than by his unaffected manners, by a kind of simplicity which women recognize as unconscious, the result of an inherited habit of not thinking about one's position. In excess it may be very disagreeable, but when it is combined with genuine good-nature and no self-assertion, it is attractive. And although American women like a man who is aggressive towards the world and combative, there is the delight of novelty in one who has leisure to be agreeable, leisure for them, and who seems to their imagination to have a larger range in life than those who are driven by business—one able to offer the peace and security of something attained.

      There had been several little neighborhood entertainments, dinners at the Morgans' and at Mrs. Fletcher's, and an evening cup of tea at Miss Forsythe's. In fact Margaret and Mr. Lyon had been thrown much together. He had accompanied her to vespers, and they had taken a wintry walk or two together before the snow came. My wife had not managed it—she assured me of that; but she had not felt authorized to interfere; and she had visited the public library and looked into the British Peerage. Men were so suspicious. Margaret was quite able to take care of herself. I admitted that, but I suggested that the Englishman was a stranger in a strange land, that he was far from home, and had perhaps a weakened sense of those powerful social influences which must, after all, control him in the end. The only response to this was, “I think, dear, you'd better wrap him up in cotton and send him back to his family.”

      Among her other activities Margaret was interested in a mission school in the city, to which she devoted an occasional evening and Sunday afternoons. This was a new surprise for Mr. Lyon. Was this also a part of the restlessness of American life? At Mrs. Howe's german the other evening the girl had seemed wholly absorbed in dress, and the gayety of the serious formality of the occasion, feeling the responsibility of it scarcely less than the “leader.” Yet her mind was evidently much occupied with the “condition of women,” and she taught in a public school. He could not at all make it out. Was she any more serious about the german than about the mission school? It seemed odd at her age to take life so seriously. And was she serious in all her various occupations, or only experimenting? There was a certain mocking humor in the girl that puzzled the Englishman still more.

      “I have not seen much of your life,” he said one night to Mr. Morgan; “but aren't most American women a little restless, seeking an occupation?”

      “Perhaps they have that appearance; but about the same number find it, as formerly, in marriage.”

      “But I mean, you know, do they look to marriage as an end so much?”

      “I don't know that they ever did look to marriage as anything but a means.”

      “I can tell you, Mr. Lyon,” my wife interrupted, “you will get no information out of Mr. Morgan; he is a scoffer.”

      “Not at all, I do assure you,” Morgan replied. “I am just a humble observer. I see that there is a change going on, but I cannot comprehend it. When I was young, girls used to go in for society; they danced their feet off from seventeen to twenty-one. I never heard anything about any occupation; they had their swing and their fling, and their flirtations; they appeared to be skimming off of those impressionable, joyous years the cream of life.”

      “And you think that fitted them for the seriousness of life?” asked his wife.

      “Well, I am under the impression that very good women came out of that society. I got one out of that dancing crowd who has been serious enough for me.”

      “And little enough you have profited by it,” said Mrs. Morgan.

      “I'm content. But probably I'm old-fashioned. There is quite another spirit now. Girls out of pinafores must begin seriously to consider some calling. All their flirtation from seventeen to twenty-one is with some occupation. All their dancing days they must go to college, or in some way lay the foundation for a useful life. I suppose it's all right. No doubt we shall have a much higher style of women in the future than we ever had in the past.”

      “You allow nothing,” said Mrs. Fletcher, “for the necessity of earning a living in these days of competition. Women never will come to their proper position in the world, even as companions of men, which you regard as their highest office, until they have the ability to be self-supporting.”

      “Oh, I admitted the fact of the independence of women a long time ago. Every one does that before he comes to middle life. About the shifting all round of this burden of earning a living, I am not so sure. It does not appear yet to make competition any less; perhaps competition would disappear if everybody did earn his own living and no more. I wonder, by-the-way, if the girls, the young women, of the class we seem to be discussing ever do earn as much as would pay the wages of the servants who are hired to do the housework in their places?”

      “That is a most ignoble suggestion,” I could not help saying, “when you know that the object in modern life is the cultivation of the mind, the elevation of women, and men also, in intellectual life.”

      “I suppose so. I should like to have asked Abigail Adams's opinion on the way to do it.”

      “One would think,” I said, “that you didn't know that the spinning-jenny and the stocking-knitter had been invented. Given these, the women's college was a matter of course.”

      “Oh, I'm a believer in all kinds of machinery anything to save labor. Only, I have faith that neither the jenny nor the college will change human nature, nor take the romance out of life.”

      “So have I,” said my wife. “I've heard two things affirmed: that women who receive a scientific or professional education lose their faith, become usually agnostics, having lost sensitiveness to the mysteries of life.”

      “And you think, therefore, that they should not have a scientific education?”

      “No, unless all scientific prying into things is a mistake. Women may be more likely at first to be upset than men, but they will recover their balance when the novelty is worn off. No amount of science will entirely change their emotional nature; and besides, with all our science, I don't see that the supernatural has any less hold on this generation than on the former.”

      “Yes, and you might say the world was never before so credulous as it is now. But what was the other thing?”

      “Why, that co-education is likely to diminish marriages among the co-educated. Daily familiarity in the classroom at the most impressionable age, revelation of all the intellectual weaknesses and petulances, absorption of mental routine on an equality, tend to destroy the sense of romance and mystery that are the most powerful attractions between the sexes. It is a sort of disenchanting familiarity СКАЧАТЬ