A man's foes are those of his own household, and the keenest enemies of women are women themselves. No one can inflict such humiliation on a woman as can a woman when she chooses; for if the art of high-handed snubbing belongs to men, that of subtle wounding is peculiarly feminine, and is practised by the best-bred of the sex. Women are always more or less antagonistic to each other. They are gregarious in fashions and emulative in follies, but they cannot combine; they never support their weak sisters; they shrink from those who are stronger than the average; and if they would speak the truth boldly, they would confess to a radical contempt for each other's intellect—which perhaps is the real reason why the sect of the 'emancipated' commands so small a following.
Half a dozen ordinary men advocating 'emancipation' doctrines would do more towards leavening the whole bulk of womankind than any number of first-class women. Where these do stand by each other it is from instinctive or personal affection rather than from class solidarity. And this is one of the most striking distinctions of sex, and one cause, among others, why men have the upper hand, and why they are able to keep it. Certainly there are reasons, sufficiently good, why women do not more readily coalesce; and one is the immense difference between the two extremes—the silly being too silly to appreciate the wise, and the weak too weak to bear the armour of the strong. There is more difference between outsiders among women than there is among men; the feminine characteristic of exaggeration making a gap which the medium or average man fills. The ways of women with each other more than all else show the great difference between their morale and that of men. They flatter and coax as men could not do, but they are also more rude to each other than any man would be to his fellow. It is amazing to see the things they can do and will bear—things which no man would dream of standing and which no man would dare to attempt. This is because they are not taught to respect each other, and because they have no fear of consequences. If one woman is insulted by another, she cannot demand satisfaction nor knock the offender down; and it is unladylike to swear and call names. She must bear what she can repay only in kind; but, to do her justice, she repays in a manner undeniably effective and to the point.
There is nothing very pronounced about the feminine modes of aggression and retaliation; and yet each is eloquent and sufficient for its purpose. It may be only a stare, a shrug, a toss of the head; but women can throw an intensity of disdain into the simplest gesture which answers the end perfectly. The unabashed serenity and unflinching constancy with which one woman can stare down another is in itself an art that requires a certain amount of natural genius, as well as careful cultivation. She puts up her eyeglass—not being shortsighted—and surveys the enemy standing two feet from her, with a sublime contempt for her whole condition, or with a still more sublime ignoring of her sentient existence, that no words could give. If the enemy be sensitive and unused to the kind of thing, she is absolutely crushed, destroyed for the time, and reduced to the most pitiable state of self-abasement. If she be of a tougher fibre, and has had some experience of feminine warfare, she returns the stare with a corresponding amount of contempt or of obliviousness; and from that moment a contest is begun which never ceases and which continually gains in bitterness. The stare is the weapon of offence most in use among women, and is specially favoured by the experienced against the younger and less seasoned. It is one of the instinctive arms native to the sex; and we have only to watch the introduction of two girls to each other to see this, and to learn how even in youth is begun the exercise which time and use raise to such deadly perfection.
In the conversations of women with each other we again meet with examples of their peculiar amenities to their own sex. They never refrain from showing how much they are bored; they contradict flatly, without the flimsiest veil of apology to hide their rudeness; and they interrupt ruthlessly, whatever the subject in hand may be. One lady was giving another a minute account of how the bride looked yesterday when she was married to Mr. A., of somewhat formidable boudoir repute, with whom her listener had had sundry tender passages which made the mention of his marriage a notoriously sore subject. 'Ah! I see you have taken that old silk which Madame Josephine wanted to palm off on me last year,' said the tortured listener brusquely breaking into the narrative without a lead of any kind. And the speaker was silenced. In this case it was the interchange of doubtful courtesies, wherein neither deserved pity; but to make a disparaging remark about a gown, in revenge for turning the knife in a wound, was a thoroughly feminine manner of retaliation, and one that would not have touched a man. Such shafts fall blunted against the rugged skin of the coarser creature; and the date or pattern of a bit of cloth would not have told much against the loss of a lover. But as most women passionately care for dress, their toilet is one of their most vulnerable parts. Ashamed to be unfashionable, they tolerate anything in each other rather than shabbiness or eccentricity, even when picturesque; hence a sarcastic allusion to the age of a few yards of silk as a set-off against a grossly cruel stab was a return wound of considerable depth cleverly given.
The introduction of the womankind belonging to a favourite male acquaintance of somewhat lower social condition affords a splendid opportunity for the display of feminine amenity. The presentation cannot be refused, yet it is resented as an intrusion. 'Another daughter, Mr. C.! You must have a dozen daughters surely,' a peeress said disdainfully to a commoner whom personally she liked, but whose family she did not want to know. The poor man had but two; and this was the introduction of the second.
Very painful to a high-spirited gentlewoman must be the way in which a superior creature of this kind receives her, if not of the same set as herself. The husband of the inferior creature may be adored, as men are adored by fashionable women who love only themselves, and care only for their own pleasures. Artist, man of letters, beau sabreur, he is the passing idol, the temporary toy, of a certain circle; and his wife has to be tolerated for his sake, and because she is a lady and fit to be presented, though an outsider. So they patronize her till the poor woman's blood is on fire; or they snub her till she has no moral consistency left in her, and is reduced to a mere mass of pulp. They keep her in another room while they talk to her husband with their other intimates; or they admit her into their circle, where she is made to feel like a Gentile among the faithful, for either they leave her unnoticed altogether or else speak to her on subjects quite apart from the general conversation, as if she were incapable of understanding them on their own ground. They ask her to dinner without her husband, and take care that there is no one to meet her whom she would like to see; but they ask him when they are at their grandest, and express their deep regret that his wife (uninvited) cannot accompany him. They know every turn and twist that can humiliate her if she has pretensions which they choose to demolish. They praise her toilet for its good taste in simplicity, when she thinks she is one of the finest on an occasion on which no one can be too fine. They tell her that pattern of hers is perfect, and made just like the dear duchess's famous dress last season, when she believes that she has Madame Josephine's last, freshly imported from Paris. They celebrate her dinner as the very perfection of a refined family dinner without parade or cost, though it has all been had from the crack confectioner's, and though the bill for the entertainment will cause many a day of family pinching. These are the things which women say to one another when they wish to pain and humiliate; things which pain and humiliate some more than would a positive disgrace. For some women are distressingly sensitive about these little matters. Their lives are made up of trifles, and a failure in a trifle is a failure in their object of life.
Women can do each other no end of despite in a small way in society, not to speak of mischief of a graver kind. A hostess who has a grudge against one of her more famous lady-guests can always ensure her a disappointing evening under cover of doing her supreme honour and paying her extra attention. If she sees the enemy engaged in a pleasant conversation with one of the male stars, down she swoops, and in the sweetest manner possible carries her off to another part of the room, to introduce her to some school-girl who can only say yes or no in the wrong places—'who is dying for the honour of talking to you, my dear;' or to some unfledged stripling who blushes and grows hot and cannot stammer out two consecutive sentences, but who is presented as a rising genius and to be treated with the consideration due to his future. As her persecution is done under the guise of extra friendliness, the poor victim cannot cry out, nor yet resist; but she knows that whenever she goes to Mrs. So and So's she will be seated next the stupidest man at table, and prevented from talking to any one she likes in the evening; and that every visit to that lady is made in some occult manner unpleasant to her. And yet what has she to complain of? She cannot complain in that her hostess trusts to her for help in the success of her entertainment, and moves her about the room as a perambulating attraction which she has to dispense fairly among her guests, lest some should be jealous of the others. She may know that the meaning is to annoy; but who can act on meaning as against manner? How crooked soever the first may be, if the last is straight the case falls to the ground, and there is no room for remonstrance.
Often women flirt as much to annoy other women as to attract men or amuse themselves. If a wife has crossed swords with a friend, and the husband is in any way endurable, let her look out for retaliation. The woman she has offended will take her revenge by flirting more or less openly with the husband, all the while loading the enemy with flattery if she be afraid of her, or snubbing her without much disguise if she feel herself the stronger. The wife cannot help herself, unless things go too far for public patience. A jealous woman without proof is the butt of her society, and brings the whole world of women like a nest of wasps about her ears. If wise, she will ignore what she cannot laugh at; if sensitive, she will fret; if vindictive, she will repay. Nine times out of ten she does the last, and, may be, with interest; and so goes on the duel, though all the time the fighters appear to be intimate friends and on the best possible terms together.
But the range of these feminine amenities is not confined to women; it includes men as well; and women continually take advantage of their position to insult the stronger sex by saying to them things which can be neither answered nor resented. A woman can with the quietest face and the gentlest voice imaginable insinuate that you have just cheated at cards; she can give you the lie direct as coolly as if she were correcting a misprint; and you cannot defend yourself. To brawl with her would be unpardonable; to contradict her is useless; and the sense of society does not allow you to show her any active displeasure. In this instance the weaker creature is the stronger, and the more defenceless is the safer. You have only the rather questionable consolation of knowing that you are not singular in your discomfiture, and that when she has made an end of you she will probably have a turn with your betters, and make them too, dance to her piping, whether they like the tune or not. At all events, if she humiliates you she humiliates her sisters still more; and with the knowledge that, hardly handled as you have been, others are yet more severely dealt with, you must learn to be content, and to practise as much of that grim kind of patience, which suffers keenly and bears silently, as your nature will permit.
Almost all histories and mythologies embody the idea of a race of grim females. Whether as fabulous and complex monsters, like the Sphinx and the Harpies, or in the more human forms of the Fates and the Furies, unsexed women have been universally recognized as forming part of the system of nature and to be accepted among the stranger manifestations of human life. Yet it is hard to understand why they should exist at all. As moral 'sports,' they are so far interesting to the psychologists; but, as women with definite duties and fixed functions, nothing can be less admirable. They are even worse than effeminate men—which is saying everything.
The grim female must be carefully distinguished from the masculine woman; for they are by no means essentially the same, though the types may run into each other, and sometimes do. But the masculine woman, if not grim but only Amazonian, has often much that is fine and beautiful in her, as we see in her great prototype Pallas Athene; but the grim female pur sang is never noble, never beautiful; and the only meaning of her existence—the only mission she seems sent into the world to fulfil—is that of serving as a warning to the young what to avoid.
The grim female is not necessarily an old maid, as would appear likely at first sight. We find her of all conditions indifferently—as maid, wife, widow, as mother and childless alike—and we do not find that her condition in any way affects her character. If born grim, she remains grim to the end; and neither marriage nor motherhood modifies her. The grim female of novelists is generally an old maid; but she is a caricature, painted in the broadest lines and copied from the outsides of things. She is emphatically an odd woman; odd in her dress, her mode, her state. She wears a flapping cap, skimpy skirts and rusty brown mittens on her bony hands. She has a passionate aversion against men and matrimony; and she lives queerly behind a barricaded house-door, with a small slavey, or an elderly female afflicted with deafness, to do her work and bear the brunt of her temper. But she is always odd, unmarried, unfashionable and unlike everybody else, and could never be mistaken for an ordinary woman from the first phrase which stamps her personality on the page to the last paragraph of her fictitious existence.
Now the grim female of real life may be one of the most conventional of her sex, and in fact, she generally is one of the most conventional of her sex. She is one who rules her household with a rod of iron carefully wrought after the pattern of her neighbours' rods, and to whom a dish set awry, or the second-best china instead of the best, counts for as great a moral delinquency in her servants as a breach of all the Ten Commandments together. She is a woman who regards being out of the fashion, or being foremost in the fashion, as equally reprehensible, and to whom dress is among the most important matters of life. Wherefore she is notorious for a certain grim grandeur of style, as one who respects herself by her clothes, and is known among other women as possessing handsome lace and costly velvet in profusion. Are not lace and velvet de rigueur for women of condition? and what is the grim female but the embodiment of the 'rigour of the game' in all matters? Therefore she clothes herself sumptuously, without elegance or taste; and would as soon be seen abroad in her dressing-gown and slippers as without her characteristic heavy velvet or rustling silk. But the artist's little wife, in her fresh muslin and nice admixture of colours, sails round her for grace and beauty at about one-twentieth part of what the grim female's stately ugliness has cost.
One characteristic of the grim female is her want of womanly passion for children. She may have so much maternal instinct, perverted, as to be on friendly terms with a dog or two, a cat, or may be a cockatoo; but she has no real affection for children, no comprehension of child-nature, and the 'sublime nonsense' of the nursery is a thing unknown to her from first to last. If she have children of her own, she treats them in a hard wooden way that has nothing of the ideal mother about it. She generally sees that they are properly cared for, because she is a disciplinarian; but, though she is inexorable on the score of cold baths and 'no trash,' she never condescends to the weakness of love. If her little ones are sick, they are set aside and dosed until they are well; if they are naughty, they are punished; but they never know those moments of tender indulgence which help them over a period of indisposition not severe enough for actual doctoring, yet throwing them out of gear and inducing a spell of what ignorance calls naughtiness. Rhadamanthus was a weakling compared to the grim female in the nursery; and what she is in her nursery she continues to be in the schoolroom, and the drawing-room to follow. Her children are always causes of annoyance to the grim female, and the first stirrings of individuality, the first half-unconscious trials of their young strength, are offences she cannot away with. Children and inferiors are they in her eyes, even when grown up and married; and she exacts from them the humility and deference of their lower condition. Hence she is one to whom the present generation is undeniably worse than the past; one who groans over the follies and shortcomings of the times and who thinks that good conduct died out with her own youth, and that it is not likely, by the look of things, to be restored. In fact, youth itself is the root and basis of offence; and if she coerces children, she tyrannizes over girls and snubs young men, with inexorable impartiality.
The grim female is not necessarily a strong-minded woman, nor a learned woman, like those who wear spectacles, go to scientific meetings and are great in the classics and the 'ologies. She may be of the emancipated class; it all depends on chance; and a grim female, when of the emancipated, is a very formidable person indeed. But she is not necessarily one of these. On the contrary, part of her very grimness comes from her intense conservatism and uncompromising conventionality. Nothing is so abhorrent to her as innovation or novelty in any shape. She does not hold with any one out of the narrowest groove of respectable belief, in what direction soever the diverging line may go. A Romanist or a Baptist, a Jew or an infidel, it is all one to her; each is equally dreadful to her, and each is eternally foredoomed. She is of the orthodox Church without fal-lals; as far removed from Ritualism as she is from ranting, and demanding for herself that infallibity of judgment and absolute possession of the truth which she denies to the Pope and all his Cardinals. Beware how you broach new doctrines in her presence. She has been known before now to abjure her nearest relations for no greater moral lapse than a weak belief in globules; while, as for anything like graver aberrations, say on the ape theory or on the plurality of races, on development in religions or on a republican form of government, she has no toleration whatever. If the Smithfield fires existed at the present day, the grim female would be the first to light the faggots. It is all the same if she belongs to any Dissenting persuasion; part of her grimness coming from her intolerance, and her own beliefs being simply the springboard on which she stands.
Many causes produce the grim female. It may be that she is grim from social pride as well as from natural hardness. If she has been used to live with people whom, rightly or wrongly, she considers her inferiors, she will probably queen it over them in a very unmistakeable manner. The prelatic blood is renowned for this sort of thing; and a bishop's daughter, or an archbishop's grand-daughter, or Mrs. Proudie, prelatic by marriage only, if of the grim class, is one of the grimmest of her class. The halo of sanctity round the mitre and the crozier will be greater in her eyes than even the glitter of the strawberry leaves; and she holds herself consecrated by her birth or marriage to the understanding of every moral question, and specially to the final settlement of every tough theological position. Or she may be grim because of her isolation and meagre intercourse with the world at large; such as she is found in the remoter districts. This kind comes into the exceptional or novelist's class, and is often more masculine than grim. These are the women who hunt and fish and shoot like men, and who may be found in all weathers wandering alone about the mountains in short petticoats and spatterdashes—women who affect to be essentially mannish in person, habits and attire, and who may be quite jolly easy-going fellows in their own way, or else grim and trenchant, as nature or the fit takes them. This is a kind not at all uncommon in country places among the higher class of resident ladies—ladies who are so highly placed locally that they can afford to disregard public opinion, and who are so independent by disposition that they naturally go off to the manly side, and make themselves bad imitations, as the best they can do.
The grim female tries her strength with all newcomers. She is like one of the giants or black knights of old romance, who lived in castles or caves, whence they pounced on all passers-by, and either wrung their necks if they conquered or retreated howling if discomfited. This is what the grim female does in her degree. She dashes on all who are presented to her, and has a passage of arms as the first act of the new drama. If her opponents yield out of timidity or good-breeding, or perhaps from not understanding the warlike nature of the encounter, she puts her foot on them forthwith, and ignominiously crushes them; if they defy her, and give her back blow for blow, ten to one she cuts them and becomes their enemy for ever after. For she has not breadth enough to be magnanimous, and the one thing she never forgives is successful opposition. Very grim is she in the presence of human weakness, moral and physical. Woe to that unhappy maid of hers who has slipped on the narrow path of prudence! She will be turned out to perish with no more compunction than if she were a black-beetle to be swept out of the way.
As a nurse the grim female is precise, punctual, obedient to orders, but inexorable. She would give the patient a fit of nervous hysterics which would throw him back for a week, rather than allow him five minutes' grace in the matter of a painful operation or a nauseous draught. Without variableness or weakness herself, she cannot endure it in others, and whosoever comes under her hand must be content to remain in shape, and to keep himself well braced up to the utmost rigidity of duty. If she had to lose an arm or a leg, she would go to her trouble like a Trojan; and why not others? She would merely tighten her lips and hold her breath, and then would sit down to let herself be hacked and mangled without a groan or a word. To judge by the notice given of her in her sister's life, Emily Brontë was of the grim class, and about the grimmest for her age and state that could well be found. Had she lived, and lived unsoftened, she would have been one unbroken mass of iron and granite, without a soft spot anywhere. Her very love was fiercer than other women's hate; her strength was more terrible than a man's anger; her passions were as fiery as furnace flames. Of all the examples we could cite, she seems about the fittest for our model.
A grim female has no mercy. She may be just, but if so, it is in a hard uncompromizing way that makes her justice worse than others' partiality. For justice can be sympathetic, even if unwavering; and the grim female is never sympathetic, how painful soever the work on hand and the sentence to be executed. Neither is she gay; for she is not plastic enough to be either one or the other. She is run into an iron mould, where her nature is compressed as in a vice; and she allows of no expansion, no lipping over, no bursting of bonds anyhow.
What would become of us if all our women were like her? Without any of the feminine little weaknesses at which we have our laugh yet which we do not wholly dislike—without any of the pretty coaxing ways which we know warp our better judgment and take us out of the strict course; and yet how pleasant that warping process is!—without any even of the transient petulances which give so much light and shade to a woman's character, the grim female stands like an old-world Gorgon, turning living flesh and blood to stone. When we look at her we are inclined to forgive all the smallness and silliness which sometimes vex us in the ordinary woman, and to think that there are worse things than the love of dress for which we so often reproach our wives and daughters; that flirting, which is reprehensible no doubt, might be exchanged for something even more reprehensible; and that vanity, of the giggling, coquettish kind, though to be steadily discouraged and sternly reproved, is not quite the worst feminine thing after all. Surely not! A grim female who cannot flirt nor giggle nor cry, nor yet kiss and make up again when scolded, is far away a worse kind of thing than a feather-headed little puss who is always doing wrong by reason of her foolish brain, but who manages somehow to pull herself right because of her loving heart. Weak women, vain women, affected women, and the whole class of silly women, whatever the speciality of silliness exhibited, are tiresome enough, heaven knows; but, unsatisfactory as they are, they are better than the grim female—that woman of no sex, born without softness or sympathy and living without pity and without love.
Nothing is more incomprehensible to girls than the love and admiration sometimes given to middle-aged women. They cannot understand it; and nothing but experience will ever make them understand it. In their eyes, a woman is out of the pale of personal affection altogether when she has once lost that shining gloss of youth, that exquisite freshness of skin and suppleness of limb, which to them, in the insolent plenitude of their unfaded beauty, constitute the chief claims to admiration of the one sex from the other. And yet they cannot conceal from themselves that the pretty maid of eighteen is often deserted for the handsome woman of forty, and that the patent witchery of their own youth and brilliant colouring goes for nothing against the mysterious charms of a mature siren. What can they say to such an anomaly? There is no good in going about the world disdainfully wondering how on earth a man could ever have taken up with such an antiquated creature!—suggestively asking their male friends what could he see in a woman of her age, old enough to be his mother? There the fact stands; and facts are stubborn things. The eligible suitor who has been coveted by more than one golden-haired girl has married a woman twenty years her senior, and the middle-aged siren has quietly carried off the prize which nymphs in their teens have frantically desired to win. What is the secret? How is it done? The world, even of silly girls, has got past any belief in spells and talismans, such as Charlemagne's mistress wore, and yet the man's fascination seems to them quite as miraculous and almost as unholy as if it had been brought about by the black art. But if they had any analytical power they would understand the diablerie of the mature siren clearly enough; for it is not so difficult to understand when one puts one's mind to it.
In the first place, a woman of ripe age has a knowledge of the world, and a certain suavity of manner and moral flexibility, wholly wanting to the young. Young girls are for the most part all angles—harsh in their judgments, stiff in their prejudices, narrow in their sympathies. They are full of combativeness and self-assertion if they belong to one type of young people, or they are stupid and shy if they belong to another type. They are talkative with nothing to say, and positive with nothing known; or they are monosyllabic dummies who stammer out Yes or No at random, and whose brains become hopelessly confused at the first sentence with which the stranger, to whom they have just been introduced, attempts to open a conversation. They are generally without pity; their want of experience making them hard towards sorrows which they do not understand—let us charitably hope also making them ignorant of the pain they inflict. That famous article in the Times on the cruelty of young girls, àpropos of Constance Kent's confession, though absurdly exaggerated, had in it the core of truth which gives the sting to such papers, which makes them stick, and which is the real cause of the outcry they create.
Girls are cruel; there is no question about it. If passive rather than active, they are simply indifferent to the sufferings of others; if of a more active temperament, they find a positive pleasure in giving pain. A girl will say horribly cruel things to her dearest friend, then laugh at her because she cries. Even her own mother she will hurt and humiliate if she can; while, as for any unfortunate aspirant not approved of, were he as tough-skinned as a rhinoceros she would find means to make him wince. But all this acerbity is toned down in the mature woman. Experience has enlarged her sympathies, and knowledge of suffering has softened her heart to the sufferings of others. Her lessons of life too, have taught her tact; and tact is one of the most valuable lessons that a man or woman can learn. She sees at a glance the weak points and sore places in her companion, and she avoids them; or if she passes over them, it is with a hand so soft and tender, a touch so soothing, that she calms instead of irritating. A girl would have come down on those weak places heavily, and would have torn off the bandages from the sore ones, jesting at scars because she herself had never felt a wound, and deriding the sybaritism of diachylon because ignorant of the anguish it conceals.
Furthermore, the mature siren is thoughtful for others. Girls are self-asserting and aggressive. Life is so strong in them, and the instinct which prompts them to try their strength with all comers and to get the best of everything everywhere, is so irrepressible, that they are often disagreeable because of that instinctive selfishness, that craving, natural to the young, of taking all and giving back nothing. But the mature siren knows better than this. She knows that social success entirely depends on what each of us can throw into the common fund of society; that the surest way to win consideration for ourselves is to be considerate for others; that sympathy begets liking, and self-suppression leads to exaltation; and that if we want to gain love we must first show how well we can give it. Her tact then, and her sympathy, her moral flexibility and quick comprehension of character, her readiness to give herself to others, are some of the reasons, among others, why the society of a cultivated agreeable woman of a certain age is sought by those men to whom women are more than mere mistresses or toys. Besides, she is a good conversationalist. She has no pretensions to any special or deep learning—for, if pedantic, she is spoilt as a siren at any age—but she knows a little about most things; at all events, she knows enough to make her a pleasant companion in a tête-à-tête or at a dinner-table, and to enable her to keep up the ball when thrown. And men like to talk to intelligent women. They do not like to be taught nor corrected by them, but they like that quick sympathetic intellect which follows them readily, and that amount of knowledge which makes a comfortable cushion for their own. And a mature siren who knows what she is about would never do more than this, even if she could.
Though the mature siren rests her claims to admiration on more than mere personal charms, and appeals to something beyond the senses, yet she is personable and well preserved, and, in a favourable light, looks nearly as young as ever. So the men say who knew her when she was twenty; who loved her then, and have gone on loving her, with a difference, despite the twenty years which lie between this and then. Girls, indeed, despise her charms because she is no longer young; and yet she may be even more beautiful than youth. She knows all the little niceties of dress, and, without going into the vulgar trickery of paint and dyes—which would make her hideous—is up to the best arts of the toilet by which every point is made to tell and every minor beauty is given its fullest value. For part of the art and mystery of sirenhood is an accurate perception of times and conditions, and a careful avoidance of that suicidal mistake of which la femme passée is so often guilty—namely, setting herself in confessed rivalry with the young by trying to look like them, and so losing the good of what she has retained, and betraying the ravages of time by the contrast.
The mature siren is wiser than this. She knows exactly what she has and what she can do; and before all things avoids whatever seems too youthful for her years; and this is one reason why she is always beautiful, because always in harmony. Besides, she has very many good points, many positive charms still left. Her figure is still good—not slim and slender certainly, but round and soft, and with that slower, riper, lazier grace which, quite different from the antelope-like elasticity of youth, is in its own way as lovely. If her hair has lost its maiden luxuriance she makes up with crafty arrangements of lace, which are more picturesque than the fashionable wisp of hay-like ends tumbling half-way to the waist. She has still her white and shapely hands with their pink filbert-like nails; still her pleasant smile and square small teeth—those one or two new, matching so perfectly with the old as to be undiscoverable! Her eyes are bright yet, and if the upper muscles are a little shrunk, the consequent apparent enlargement of the orbit only makes them more expressive; her lips are not yet withered; her skin is not wrinkled. Undeniably, when well-dressed and in a favourable light, the mature siren is as beautiful in her own way as the girlish belle; and the world knows it and acknowledges it.
That mature sirens can be passionately loved, even when very mature, history gives us more than one example; and the first name that naturally occurs to one's mind is that of the too famous Ninon de l'Enclos. And Ninon, if a trifle mythical, was yet a fact and an example. But not going quite to Ninon's age, we often see women of forty and upwards who are personally charming, and whom men love with as much warmth and tenderness as if they were in the heyday of life—women who count their admirers by dozens, and who end by making a superb marriage, and having quite an Indian summer of romance and happiness. The young laugh at this idea of the Indian summer for a bride of forty-five; but it is true; for neither romance nor happiness, neither love nor mental youth, is a matter of years; and after all we are only as old as we feel, and certainly no older than we look.
All women do not harden by time, nor wither, nor yet corrupt. Some merely ripen and mellow and get enriched by the passage of the years, retaining the most delicate womanliness—we had almost said girlishness into quite old age, blushing as swiftly under their grey hairs, while shrinking from anything coarse or vulgar or impure as sensitively, as when they were girls. La femme à quarante ans is the French term for the opening of the great gulf beyond which love cannot pass; but human history disproves this date, and shows that the heart can remain fresh and the person lovely long after the age fixed for the final adieu to admiration—that the mature siren can be adored by her own contemporaries when the rising generation regard her as nothing better than a chimney-corner fixture. Mr. Trollope recognized the claims of the mature siren in his Orley Farm and Miss Mackenzie; and no one can deny the intense naturalness of the characters and the interest of the stories.
Another point which tells with the mature woman is, that she is not jealous nor exacting. She knows the world, and takes what comes with that philosophy which springs from knowledge. If she be of an enjoying nature—and she cannot be a siren else—she accepts such good as floats to the top, neither looking too deep into the cup nor speculating on the time when she shall have drained it to the dregs. Men feel safe with her. If they have entered on a tender friendship with her, they know that there will be no scene, no tears, no upbraidings, when an inexorable fate comes in to end their pleasant little drama, with the inevitable wife as the scene-shifter. The mature siren knows so well that fate and the wife must break in between her and her friend, that she is resigned from the first to what is foredoomed, and thus accepts her bitter portion, when it comes, with dignity and in silence. Where younger women would fall into hysterics and make a scene, perhaps go about the world taking their revenge in slander, the middle-aged woman holds out a friendly hand and takes the back seat gallantly, never showing by word nor look that she has felt her deposition. She becomes the best friend of the new household; and if any one is jealous, ten to one it is the husband who is jealous of her love for his wife. Of course it may be the wife herself, who cannot see what her husband can find to admire so much in Mrs. A, and who pouts at his extraordinary predilection for her, though of course she would scorn to be jealous—as, indeed, she has no cause. For even a mature siren, however delightful she may be, is not likely to come before a young wife in the heart of a young husband. Though the French paint the love of a woman of forty as pathetic, because slightly ridiculous and certainly hopeless, yet they arrange their theory of social life so that a youth is generally supposed to make his first love of a married woman many years his elder, while a mature siren finds her last love in a youth.
We have not come to this yet in England, either in theory or practice; and it is to be hoped that we never shall come to it. Mature sirens are all very well for men of their own age, and it is pleasant to see them still loved and admired, and to recognize in them the claims of women to something higher than mere personal passion; but the case would be very different if they became ghoulish seducers of the young, and kept up the habit of love by entangling boyish hearts and blighting youthful lives. As they are now, they form a charming element in society, and are of infinite use to the world. They are the ripe fruit in the garden where else everything would be green and immature—the last days of the golden summer set against the disappointing backwardness of spring and before the chills of autumn have come. They contain in themselves the advantages of two distinct epochs, and while possessing as much personal charm as youth, possess also the gains which come by experience and maturity. They keep things together as the young could not do; and no gathering of friends is perfect which has not one or two mature sirens to give the tone, and prevent excesses. They soften the asperities of high-handed boys and girls, which else would be too biting; and they set people at ease, and make them in good humour with themselves, by the courtesy with which they listen to them and the patience with which they bear with them. Even the very girls who hate them fiercely as rivals love them passing well as half maternal, half sisterly, companions; and the first person to whom they would carry their sorrows would be a mature siren, quite capable for her own part of having caused them.
It would be hard indeed if the loss of youth did not bring with it some compensations; but the mature siren suffers less from that loss than any other kind of woman. Indeed, she seems to have a private elixir of her own which is not quite drained dry when she dies, beloved and regretted, at threescore years and ten; leaving behind her one or two old friends who were once her ardent lovers, and who still cherish her memory as that of the finest and most fascinating woman they ever knew—something which the present generation is utterly incapable of repeating.
Pumpkins are among the most imposing of all groundling growths. They have fine showy flowers, handsome leaves, roving stems, and they bear solid-looking fruit of a goodly size and gorgeous colour. To see them spreading over their domain with such rapid luxuriance, one would imagine them among the best things growing; but a critical examination proves their flesh to be about three parts water, while as for their stalks, they are of so pithless a nature that they can only creep along the earth, unable to stand upright without support;—which tells something against the pumpkin's claim for extra consideration. Still, their showy largeness attracts the eye, and not a few of us believe in pumpkins, and admire both their mode of growth and the fruit resulting. In like manner the human pumpkins—those beings of imposing presence and loud self-assertion—get themselves believed in by the simple; and, as occasions by which their watery and fibreless nature is revealed do not arise every day, they are for the most part accepted for the substantialities they assume to be, and the world is deceived by appearances as it ever has been.
These human pumpkins abound everywhere. In all states and professions, and in both sexes, we find them flourishing magnificently on the face of the earth, taking the lead in their society and setting themselves out as the finest fellows to be found in their respective gardens. Among them are the men of the Bombastes type, so dear to the older playwrights; braggadocios of the kill 'em and eat 'em school, who were such terrible fellows to look at and listen to, though only pumpkins of a singularly innocuous nature when stoutly squeezed and analyzed; fire-eaters of the juggling kind, with special care taken that the fire shall be harmless and that the danger shall lie only in the fear of the spectators. Now that duelling has gone out of fashion, and discharged captains who have signalized themselves in war are rare, our old swashbuckler type of pumpkins has gone out both in fact and fiction, on the stage and off it. To be sure we have a few travellers of slightly apocryphal courage, and more than doubtful accuracy, whose books of perilous adventure and breathless dangers are to us what Bombastes and Bobadil were to our fathers; and we have Major Wellington de Boots with his military swagger and his hare's heart. But he is a very weak imitation of the old fire-eater; and, on the whole, this special family of the pumpkins has dwindled into insignificance, and their place knows them no more.
Then there is the pumpkin after the cut of the Prince Regent—the man of deportment, big, handsome, showy, and specially noticeable for a loud voice, a broad chest, and an indescribable air of superiority and command; the man who has studied bowing as one of the fine arts, who walks with a swagger, and even now tips his curly-brimmed hat slightly to the side. This is the kind of man who influences women. Bombastes frightens the nervous and inexperienced of his own sex, but the man of deportment partly fascinates and partly overawes the other. They take him at his own valuation, and have not skill enough to find out the flaw in the summing up until perhaps it is too late, when they have come so near to him that they are able to appraise him for themselves, and have learnt by bitter experience of what unsound materials he is made. And then let him look out. There is nothing women resent so much as pumpkin manhood—nothing which humiliates them more in their own esteem than to discover that they have been taken in by appearances, and that what they had believed in as solid wood turns out to be only squash.
Women like to rely on men, and dread nothing so much as weakness and vacillation in their male protectors; save indeed those grim and bulky females in whom Hood so much delighted, who take small men vi et armis, and subjugate them body and soul, like two-legged poodles trained to fetch and carry at the word of command. But these are exceptions; the average woman prizing strength rather than poodle-like docility. The pumpkin of the Prince Regent cut is generally notorious for laying down the law on all points. His voice is so loud and his manner of speech so dictatorial, that no one dreams of doubting still less of contradicting him, but everybody takes him as he represents himself to be—a man of prompt decision, of boundless resources, a granitic tower of strength to be leant against in all emergencies without the slightest fear of failure; a man who is not only sufficient for himself but strong enough to bear the weaknesses of others. He is famous for giving advice—advice of a vague, rapid, sprawling kind, never quite exact to the circumstances, never quite practical nor to the point—large advice, general in scope but wonderfully positive in tone, and, until you analyze, grandly imposing in effect. Nail him to the point; ask his advice seriously on any question where the responsibility of counsel will rest with him; place yourself in his hands where the consequences of failure will touch him as well as you; and then see to what meagre dimensions your goodly gourd will shrink. The confident assertion drops into a weak hesitation; the arrogant dictum melts into a timid refusal to take such a serious responsibility on himself; you have pricked your windbag, bisected your pumpkin, and henceforth you know the precise weight of substance remaining. Yet mankind sees him exactly where he was before, and he will go about the world in his large, loud way, saying to every one that if you had followed his advice you would have succeeded—supposing you have failed; or, if you have succeeded, he will take all the credit to himself, and say it was he who guided you and showed you how to go in and win. For himself, and his own affairs, he has no more moral stamina than he had leadership for you and yours. The least reverse knocks him over. Care or sorrow, when it touches him, shrivels him up as completely as frost shrivels up the pumpkin. In every circumstance requiring promptitude, coolness, keen perception, just decision, our swaggering man of froth fails ignominiously; and one hour of real pressure proves incontestably that he was only a pumpkin of imposing presence, good neither as meat nor staff when the time of trial came.
Very often the pumpkin has a wife whose fibre is as close as his is loose, and whose nature is as tough as his is soft; a hard-eyed, thin-lipped, tenacious woman, who speaks little and boasts not at all, but who does all she wishes to do, and whose iron will pins her pumpkin to the wall as the spear of the Bushman pins the elephant or the rhinoceros. It is very curious to see how a blatant blustering man who is so loud and confident abroad, knocks under at home; and how the high-crested deportment which carries things with such a lofty bearing out of doors droops into the meek submission of the henpecked husband so soon as the house-door closes on him, and he is subjected to the pitiless analysis of home. There is no question of flourish then; and if by chance the ambitious crest should make an effort to display itself, the wife knows how to lower it by a few decisive words of a keen-edged kind, and her pumpkin is made to feel sharply enough the difference existing between fibre and pulp. It is almost melancholy to see one of these fine flourishing fellows so subdued. Pumpkin as he may be, it is not pleasant to see him so cut down in his pride; and involuntarily one's sympathies go with him rather than with that tenacious, hard-mouthed wife of his, who would be none the worse perhaps for a little of her husband's essential softness and with less than her own hardness.
How often too, these big fellows have no physical stamina as well as but very shaky moral fibre! A small, wiry light-weight will do twice as much as they; not, of course, where muscle only is wanted, but where the question is of endurance. Large heavy men knock up far sooner than the light-weights; and though size and weight count for something at certain times and on occasions, fibre and tenacity go for more in the long run. In the Crimea, the men who first dropped off from exposure and privation were the magnificently-built Guardsmen—men apparently bred and fed to the highest point of physical perfection; while the undersized little liners, who had nothing to be admired in them, stood the strain gamely, and were brisk and serviceable when the others were either dead or in hospital. So far as we have gone yet, we have not solved the problem of how to combine toughness and bigness, solidity and size, but for the most part fail in the one in proportion as we succeed in the other.
Many of the dark-skinned races are what we may call emotional pumpkins. Their flashing black eyes and swarthy skins seem to be instinct with passion; they look like living furnaces filled with flames and molten metal, terrible fellows, dangerous to meddle with and almost impossible to subdue. But nine times out of ten we find them to be marvellously meek persons, timid, amenable to law, unable to give offence and incapable of taking it—lambs masquerading in tiger-skins. A fair-faced Anglo-Saxon, with his sensitive blush, good-humoured smile and light blue eyes, has more pluck and pith in him than a whole brigade of certain of these dark-skinned men. He has less ferocity perhaps than they when they are thoroughly roused, though our good-humoured Anglo-Saxon is by no means destitute of ferocity on occasions when his blood is up; but his is ferocity of the quarter-staff and bludgeon stand-up fight kind—the ferocity of strength fairly put out against an adversary, not the tigerish cruelty which is almost always found when moral weakness and physical submission have a momentary triumph and reaction. Cowardly men are like women in their revenge when once they get the upper hand; and their revenge is more cruel than that of the habitually brave man who, after a fair fight, overthrows his opponent. Some of the dark-skinned races look the very ideal of the melodramatic ruffian—operatic brigands painted with broad black lines, and up to any amount of deeds of daring and of crime; but they are only pumpkins at the core. We need not go so far as Calcutta to find them; we get examples nearer home, both in Houndsditch and in Rome; for both Jews and Italians are soft-cored men in spite of their passionate outsides, and both would be better for an extra twist and toughness in their fibres.
Intellectual pumpkins are as common as those of the more specially physical kind. You meet with philosophers and 'thinkers'—perhaps they are poets, perhaps politicians—who flourish out a vague big declamation which, when you reduce it to its essence, you find to be a platitude worth nothing; whipped cream, without any foundation of solid pudding. If they are of the philosophic sort, they quote you Fichte and Hegel, to the bewilderment of your brains unless you have gone into the metaphysical maze on your own account; but they might have put all they have said into half a dozen words of three letters, like a child's first reading lesson. The flourish imposes, and people who cannot analyze take the whipped cream for solid pudding, and think that platitudes dressed in the garb of Fichte and Hegel are utterances worthy of deep respect and admiring wonder.
All the professions which talk, either by word of mouth or in print, are specially given to this manifestation of pumpkinhood. Preachers and authors sprawl and flourish over their small inheritance with a tremendous assumption of vital force and vigorous growth; and weak hands, with weaker heads, find support and shelter in their foliage. Poets too, with a knack for turning out large moulds in which they have run very small ideas, are pumpkins dear to the feminine mind. Have we not our Tupper? had we not our 'Satan' Montgomery? and a few others whom we might catalogue if we cared for the task, each with his multifarious female following and his spiritual harem of ardent admirers? All artists—that is, the men who create, or rather who assume to create—are liable to be proved pumpkins when called on to show themselves solid wood. They talk grandly enough, but when they have to translate their words into deeds, too often the noble aims and immortal efforts they have been advocating tail off into pulp and water, and we have botches and pot-boilers instead of masterpieces and high art. Perhaps we may take it as a rule that all doers who talk much and boast grandly are of the pumpkin order, and that art, like nature, elaborates best in silence.
Strong-visaged women are often pure pumpkins with a very rough and corrugated outside. It is astonishing how soon they break down, and for all their stern and powerful looks sink under burdens under which a frail little creature, as light as thistledown, will glide along quite easily. Women with black brows and harsh voices—brigandesses by appearance, or like the typical Herodias of unimaginative artists—are often the gentlest and most pithless of their sex, and may be seen acting quite compassionately towards their infants, or vindicating their womanhood by meekly sewing on their husbands' buttons and weeping at their rebukes; while a fair, silver-tongued, languid lady, as soft as if she were made of nothing harder than the traditional cream and rose-leaves, will give up her babies as a prey to unfeeling nurses and let her husband go buttonless and in rags, while she lounges before the fire indifferent to his wrath and callous to his wrongs. There is many a house mistress who looks as if she could use her fists when annoyed, who is absolutely afraid of her servants; and the maid is always the mistress when the one is fibre and the other pulp.
Heaven be praised that the strong-visaged women are not 'clear grit' all through. If they were as hard as they look, the world would go but queerly, and society would have to make new laws for the protection of its weaker male members. But nature is merciful as well as sportive, and while she amuses herself by creating pumpkins of formidable aspect, takes care that the core shall not always correspond to the rind. Like the Athenian images of the satyr which enclosed a god, the black-browed brigandesses and the men of magnificent deportment are sometimes impostors of a quite amiable kind; and when you have once learnt by heart the false analogies of form, you will cease to fear your typical Herodias, to be impressed by your copy of the Prince Regent, or to be influenced by your wordy Hegelian talking platitudes in the philosophic dialect.
There are widows and widows; there are those who are bereaved and those who are released; those who lose their support and those whose chains are broken; those who are sunk in desolation and those who wake up into freedom. Of the first we will not speak. Theirs is a sorrow too sacred to be publicly handled even with sympathy; but the second demand no such respectful reticence. The widow who is no sooner released from one husband than she plots for another, and the widow who leaps into liberty over the grave of a gaoler, not a lover, are fair game enough. They have always been favourite subjects whereon authors may exercise their wits; and while men are what they are—laughing animals apt to see the humour lying in incongruity, and with a spice of the devil to sharpen that same laughter into satire—they will remain favourite subjects, tragic as the state is when widowhood is deeper than mere outward condition.
There are many varieties of the widow and all are not beautiful. For one, there is the widow who is bent on re-marrying whether men like it or not; that thing of prey who goes about the world seeking whom she may devour; that awful creature who bears down on her victims with a vigour in her assaults which puts to flight the popular fancy about the weaker sex and the natural distribution of power. No hawk poised over a brood of hedge birds, no shark cruising steadily towards a shoal of small fry, no piratical craft sailing under a free flag and accountable to no law save success, was ever more formidable to the weaker things pursued than is the hawk widow to men when she is bent on re-marrying. She knows so much!—there is not a manœuvre by which a victory can be stolen that she has not mastered and she is not afraid of even the most desperate measures. When she has once struck, he would be a clever man and a strong one who should escape her. Generally left but meagrely provided for in worldly goods—else her game would not be difficult—she makes up for her financial poverty by her wealth of bold resources, and by the courage with which she takes her own fortunes in hand and, with her own, those of her more eligible masculine associates. She is a woman of purpose and lives for an end; and that end is remarriage, with the most favourable settlement that can be obtained by her lawyer from his. If fate has dealt hardly by her—though, may be, compassionately by her successive spouses—and has landed her in the widowed state twice or thrice, she is in nowise daunted and as little abashed. She merely refits after a certain time of anchorage, and goes out into the open again for a repetition of her chance. She has no notion of a perpetuity of weeds, and, though she may have cleared her half century with a margin besides, thinks the suggestive orange-blossoms of the bride infinitely more desirable than the fruitless heliotrope of the widow. If one husband is taken, she remembers the old proverb, and reflects on the many, quite as good, who are left potentially subject to her choice. And somehow she manages. It has been said that any woman can marry any man if she determines to do so, and follows on the line of her determination with tenacity and common-sense.
The hawk widow exemplifies the truth of this saying. She determines upon marriage; and she usually succeeds; the question being one of victim only, not of sacrifice. One has to fall to her share; there is no help for it; and the whole contest is, which shall it be? which is strongest to break her bonds? which craftiest to slip out of them? which most resolute not to bear them from the beginning? This the straggling covey must settle among themselves the best way they can. When the hawk pounces down upon its quarry, it is sauve qui peut! But all cannot be saved. One has to be caught; and the choice is determined partly by chance and partly by relative strength. When the widow of experience and resolve bears down on her prey, the result is equally certain. Floundering avails nothing; struggling and splashing are just as futile; one among the crowd has to come to the slaughter, like Mrs. Bond's ducks, and to assist at his own immolation. The best thing he can do is to make a handsome surrender, and to let the world of men and brothers believe he rather likes his position than not.
But there are pleasanter types of the re-marrying widow than this. There is the widow of the Wadman kind, who has outlived her grief and is not disinclined to a repetition of the matrimonial experiment, if asked humbly by an experimenter after her own heart. But she must be asked humbly that she may grant in a pretty, tender, womanly way—if not quite so timidly as a girl, yet as becomingly in her degree, and with that peculiar fascination which nothing but the combination of experience and modesty can give. The widow of the Wadman kind is no creature of prey, neither shark nor hawk; at the worst she is but a cooing dove, making just the sweetest little noise in the world, the tenderest little call to indicate her whereabouts, and to show that she is lonely and feels a-cold. She sits close, waiting to be found, and does not ramp and dash about like the hawk sisterhood; neither does she pretend that she is unwilling to be found, still less deny that a soft warm nest, well lined and snugly sheltered, is better than a lonely branch stretching out comfortless and bare into the bleak wide world. She, too, is almost sure to get what she wants, with the advantage of being voluntarily chosen and not unwillingly submitted to.
This is the kind of woman who is always mildly but thoroughly happy in her married life; unless indeed her husband should be a brute, which heaven forefend. She lives in peace and bland contentment while the fates permit, and when he dies she buries him decently and laments him decorously; but she thinks it folly to spend her life in weeping by the side of his cold grave, when her tears can do no good to either of them. Rather she thinks it a proof of her love for him, and the evidence of how true was her happiness, that she should elect to give him a successor. Her blessed experience in the past has made her trustful of the future; and because she has found one man faithful she thinks that all are Abdiels. As a rule, this type of woman does find men pleasant; and by her own nature she ensures domestic happiness. She is always tenderly, and never passionately, in love, even with the husband she has loved the best. She gives in to no excesses to the right nor to the left. Her temperament is of that serene moonlight kind which does not fatigue others nor wear out its possessor. Without ambition or the power to fling herself into any absorbing occupation, she lives only to please and be pleased at home; and if she be not a wife, wearing her light fetters lovingly and proud that she is fettered, she is nothing. As some women are born mothers and others are born nuns, so is the Wadman woman a born wife, and shines in no other character nor capacity. But in this she excels; and knowing this, she sticks to her rôle, how frequently so ever the protagonist may be changed.
There are widows, however, who have no thought nor desire for remaining anything but widows—who have gained the worth of the world in their condition, 'Jeune, riche, et veuve—quel bonheur!' says the French wife, eyeing 'mon mari' askance. Can the most exacting woman ask for more? And truly such a one is in the most enviable position possible to a woman, supposing always that she has not lost in her husband the man she loved. If she has lost only the man who sat by right at the same hearth with herself—perhaps the man who quarrelled with her across the ashes—she has lost her burden and gained her release.
The cross of matrimony lies heavy on many a woman who never takes the world into her confidence, and who bears in absolute silence what she has not the power to cast from her. Perhaps her husband has been a man of note, a man of learning, of elevated station, a political or a philanthropic power. She alone knew the fretfulness, the petty tyranny, the miserable smallness at home of the man of large repute whom his generation conspired to honour, and whose public life was a mark for the future to date by. When he died the press wrote his eulogy and his elegy; but his widow, when she put on her weeds, sang softly in her own heart a pæan to the great King of Freedom, and whispered to herself Laudamus with a sigh of unutterable relief. To such a woman widowhood has no sentimental regrets. She has come into possession of the goods for which perhaps she sold herself; she is young enough to enjoy the present and to project a future; she has the free choice of a maid and the free action of a matron, as no other woman has. She may be courted and she need not be chaperoned, nor yet forced to accept. Experience has mellowed and enriched her; for though the asperities of her former condition were sharp while they lasted, they have not permanently roughened nor embittered her. Then the sense of relief gladdens, while the sense of propriety subdues, her; and the delicate mixture of outside melancholy, tempered with internal warmth, is wonderfully enticing. Few men know how to resist that gentle sadness which does not preclude the sweetest sympathy with pleasures in which she may not join—with happiness which is, alas! denied her. It gives an air of such profound unselfishness; it asks so mutely, so bewitchingly, for consolation!
Even a hard man is moved at the sight of a pretty young widow in the funereal black of her first grief, sitting apart with a patient smile and eyes cast meekly down, as one not of the world though in it. Her loss is too recent to admit of any thought of reparation; and yet what man does not think of that time of reparation? and if she be more than usually charming in person and well dowered in purse, what man does not think of himself as the best repairer she could take? Then, as time goes on and she glides gracefully into the era of mitigated grief, how beautiful is her whole manner, how tasteful her attire! The most exquisite colours of the prismatic scale look garish beside her dainty tints, and the untempered mirth of happy girls is coarse beside her subdued admission of moral sunshine. Greys as tender as a dove's breast; regal purples which have a glow behind their gloom; stately silks of sombre black softly veiled by clouds of gauzy white or brightened with the 'dark light' of sparkling jet—all speak of passing time and the gradual blooming of the spring after the sadness of the winter; all symbolize the flowers which are growing on the sod that covers the dear departed; all hint at a melting of the funereal gloom into the starlight of a possible bridal. She begins too to take pleasure in the old familiar things of life. She steals into a quiet back seat at the Opera; she just walks through a quadrille; she sees no harm in a fête or flower-show, if properly companioned. Winter does not last for ever; and a life-long mourning is a wearisome prospect. So she goes through her degrees in accurate order, and comes out at the end radiant.
For when the faint shadows cast by the era of mitigated grief fade away, she is the widow par excellence—the blooming widow, young, rich, gay, free; with the world on her side, her fortune in her hand, the ball at her foot. She is the freest woman alive; freer even than any old maid to be found. Freedom, indeed, comes to the old maid when too late to enjoy it; at least in certain directions; for while she is young she is necessarily in bondage, and when parents and guardians leave her at liberty, the world and Mrs. Grundy take up the reins and hold them pretty tight. But the widow is as thoroughly emancipated from the conventional bonds which confine the free action of a maid as she is from those which fetter the wife; and only she herself knows what she has lost and gained. She bore her yoke well while it pressed on her. It galled her but she did not wince; only when it was removed, did she become fully conscious of how great had been the burden, from her sense of infinite relief through her freedom. The world never knew that she had passed under the harrow; probably therefore it wonders at her cheerfulness, with the dear departed scarce two years dead; and some say how sweetly resigned she is, and others how unfeeling. She is neither. She is simply free after having lived in bondage; and she is glad in consequence. But she is dangerous. In fact, she is the most dangerous of all women to men's peace of mind. She does not want to marry again—does not mean to marry again for many years to come, if ever; granted; but this does not say that she is indifferent to admiration or careless of men's society. And being without serious intentions herself, she does not reflect that she may possibly mislead and deceive others who have no such cause as she has to beware of the pleasant folly of love and its results.
In the exercise of her prerogative as a free woman, able to cultivate the dearest friendships with men and fearlessly using her power, she entangles many a poor fellow's heart which she never wished to engage more than platonically, and crushes hopes which she had not the slightest intention to raise. Why cannot men be her friends? she asks, with a pretty, pleading look—a tender kind of despair at the wrong-headedness of the stronger sex. But, tender as she is, she does not easily yield even when she loves. The freedom she has gone through so much to gain she does not rashly throw away; and if ever the day comes when she gives it up into the keeping of another—and for all her protestations it comes sometimes—the man to whom she succumbs may congratulate himself on a victory more flattering to his vanity, and more complete in its surrender of advantages, than he could have gained over any other woman. Belle or heiress, of higher rank or of greater fame than himself, no unmarried woman could have made such a sacrifice in her marriage as did this widow of means and good looks, when she laid her freedom, her joyous present and potential future, in his hand. He will be lucky if he manages so well that he is never reproached for that sacrifice—if his wife never looks back regretfully to the time when she was a widow—if there are no longing glances forward to possibilities ahead, mingled with sighs at the difficulty of retracing a step when made. On the whole, if a woman can live without love, or with nothing stronger than a tender sentimental friendship, widowhood is the most blissful state she can attain. But if she be of a loving nature and fond of home, finding her own happiness in the happiness of others and indifferent to freedom—thinking, indeed, that feminine freedom is only another word for desolation—she will be miserable until she has doubled her experience and carried on the old into the new.