Chapter II: Part 2

One little habit I advise you to cultivate, to cultivate until it becomes as natural and as spontaneous as eating peas with a fork; it is the habit of saying “Thank you” for minor services rendered. We are all of us taught that in the nursery, I know, but an uncountable number of us, or rather of you, seem to forget it when you lengthen your skirts. Let me tell you something that happened only yesterday. I went up to Charing Cross by a mid-day train from here. The only other person in the carriage was a woman. She was a lady—you know what I mean—the sort of woman who lives in a hundred-a-year house, who keeps three maidservants and a boot boy, possibly a carriage, and who goes for a month or six weeks to the Continent or elsewhere every autumn with her husband. The sort of person who when she gives a small dinner party has little pink shades over the candles and at least two sorts of wine. I think, by the way, she was the sort who would call a table napkin a serviette, but perhaps I’m prejudiced by what happened. Well, when she reached Blackheath she rose to leave the carriage. I was sitting in the corner by the door through which she had to get out, and, of course, I opened it for her. If you sit by the door you have to open it for all the outgoers. It is a nuisance, but it has its compensation in the extra comfort of the corner seat. This woman did not say “Thank you”; she passed me without even an inclination of her sulky head. Presently two other women got in, two women of the same social standing as the one who had left. At Lewisham one of these got out. I opened the door for her. She didn’t say “Thank you.” At London Bridge precisely the same thing happened with the remaining third. All the way thence I meditated on writing a stinging letter to the _Times_ on “The Decadence of Manners in the Upper Middle Class,” but you who know me know that the letter is still to write. What happened psychologically to me was this: that I felt just a trifle less regard and respect for your sex, Alexa, than I was conscious of when I left home. I daresay it was unreasonable of me, but there it was. Women of our class are not really nice, I found myself saying to myself, not really and truly nice in the innermost soul of them. No wonder they don’t get on with their servants, I thought to myself, for if they are rude to their social equals, what must they be to those whom they think their inferiors? I rather hated your sex for about twenty-five minutes. And please don’t tell me that these impolite hussies were exceptions, because on the balance of probabilities it is most unlikely that I should have struck three exceptions in the course of one short train journey. No, Alexa, you are very rude. You are attractive sometimes, I admit; you are even, in passing moments of folly and madness, bewitching, but you are very rude. I don’t mean you personally, of course, but you regarded collectively—you women, you!

I find myself getting cross even now as I write when I recall that incident, getting cross and asking myself all sorts of questions which it were well for women that men should not ask. As, for instance: Why do we put up so tamely with so much of your cheek? Cheek is a slang word, but made venerable by long use, and I can think of no other so exactly adequate, so comprehensively expressive. Why do we not give you more severe talkings to than we do? They would do you no end of good, and we know it, and yet refrain. You scarcely ever get a severe talking to, any of you. Yesterday, after leaving Charing Cross Station, I walked up Bond Street. I was really going somewhere, oh sceptical child; you must not think your father was merely loafing. I was not in a hurry, and I looked at the shops. There were lots of pretty women driving up and down in their carriages, but I did not look at them; I was at odds with the whole sex. Well, those shops! With the exception of a fishmonger’s, a few most attractive tobacconists, in which you cannot get a briar root pipe under 25s., and a stray tailor or two, all those shops were women’s shops; full of hats for women to wear, each hat to be worn about twice, or at the most half-a-dozen times; shops full of frocks, each frock costing more than a week’s earnings of a man who works hard to make, say, £2000 a year; shops creaming over with fluffy, frilly under-things, the fluffiest and the frilliest of which disappear for ever when once they leave the shop, or, let us say, almost disappear. And then the jewellers! Rubies, emeralds, sapphires, opals in little heaps on velvet-lined trays. Diamonds and diamonds, and yet more diamonds flashing in the sunlight, flashing scorn and contempt upon all such as are too poor to purchase them; and gold, gold enough to have paved the street! Oh, and the pearls, the ropes, nay, rather the cables of pearls. Pearl fishing, they used to tell me in my _Child’s Guide to Knowledge_, is a perilous profession, and a profession followed wholly by men. And all the things that these shops displayed—of course, there was more than as much again in drawers and cupboards and stout iron safes within the shops—were to be bought by men and given to women. For what? For what, in the name of reason? Men, merely as men, give to women as much as women, just as women, give to men; and so that part of the account is squared by nature’s self, as it were. But all this balance, this ransack of Bond Street, of South African and Eastern and Australasian mines, of ocean depths, of forest solitudes, all this is collared by women, and they won’t even say “Thank you.” It is true I did not give those three women yesterday any jewels to speak of; but still I did save them the soiling of their light-coloured gloves, and you know by experience, Alexa, that carriage door handles on our railway are always filthy.

Forgive this outburst, which, after all, so far as you are concerned, is quite impersonal, but out of the bitterness of the heart the pen writeth. You want to be, and I want you to be, an exceptional woman, and the easiest way in which to be an exceptional woman is to be a polite one. I don’t think there is any radical difference between the sexes in the way of politeness. We are all born impolite—there is nothing much more impolite than a young baby—but one sex acquires politeness and the other doesn’t—that’s where it is. I wonder if you have ever noticed that. If not, just use your eyes for the next four-and-twenty hours, and once more you will be compelled to admit and to admire the accuracy of your father’s criticisms of life. Watch, watch closely, next time you see two or three young men talking to two or three women in a drawing-room or at a garden party. Notice the difference (it is not a subtle, it is a quite blatant difference) between the attitude and tone of the men to the women and those of the women to the men. Unless the men be rank outsiders, and that sort is not likely to come your way, you will find in the men’s attitude and tone a deference, a respectful diffidence—how shall I put it?—quite lacking in the women. However foolish, jejune, inconsequential be the remarks of any one of the women the man immediately talking to her will put on an air of interest; he will treat her as though anything she said had some real importance; he will receive her feeblest joke as though it were wit of the most polished. But she, well, if he doesn’t amuse her she won’t even try to look amused, and if he bores her she will most unmistakably look bored. It is horribly impolite to look bored, you know. To bore is beastly, but to look bored is damnable. Most women behave as though their mere existence were a blessing to men, as though all that men could possibly ask of them was just to be there! It is not enough, you know, Alexa; it really isn’t, and in our saner moods we men feel that. We don’t say unpleasant things of you, but we feel them.

The worst of it is that social custom accepts the woman’s point of view and enforces it. Think what happened to me last week. It was on Wednesday—on Wednesday your mother and I dined with the Devrients. Your mother was all right from start to finish. She was taken down by Forsyth—I know you rather admire him, and you are right, for he is about as clever as they make them, and talks even better than he writes. But, then, your mother is a woman, and these sort of things are arranged for the likes of her and you. But I! In obedience to that monstrous social convention which pairs off married men with married women—I never felt it so bitterly before, for your friend, the beautiful Janet, was there and sat opposite me, hidden behind a tall epergne of tall flowers, and I’m fond of Janet, and you say she likes me—I was sent down with Mrs ⸺ (never mind, I won’t mention names), a middle-aged woman, who has no beauty nor traces of beauty, who is neither clever nor interesting, who is nothing, so far as I could make out, but stupid and rather greedy. For the whole of that awful dinner—it lasted from eight until a quarter to ten—I had to make myself agreeable to that preposterous person. And I did it. I was as nice and kind as anything. I plied her with banalities, such as her soul (what there was of it) loved. I wouldn’t have minded her not being intelligent had she been pretty. I wouldn’t have minded her not being pretty had she been intelligent; but she was neither, and at the end of it I felt as though my brain had been wiped out with a sponge. Now, there was a man there with whom I particularly wanted to talk, he is one of the few men out of whom one always sets an idea or two, but devil a word could I get with him, and all because it is taken for granted that I, a man, must needs want to sit next to a woman. On the way home your mother remarked what a delightful evening it had been, and how quickly it had passed! I said—but you who know me, Alexa, know quite well that I said nothing.

The Registrar-General’s returns inform me that men are marrying less freely than they used, and that each year they marry less freely than in the year before. It is almost the one piece of evidence I can discover of the growth and development of intelligence among my sex. It means, say the commentators in the newspapers and the magazines, that men are getting more selfish, more exacting. It does. As we get more and more civilised so shall we demand more and more from life. My savage ancestor asked but little here below. I ask quite a lot, and get some. My remote descendant will ask more, and get all of it. Of course, men who fall in love will continue to marry; the Registrar-General will always have them to go on with. For a man in love the _mere girl_ suffices. But hitherto the marriage returns have been made up by the marriages of a certain number, and a pretty large number, of men who have not been in love and who consequently can see things, I mean women, more or less as they really are. For them the mere girl does not suffice. She has got to be a nice girl as well, a girl who takes as much trouble to be nice as she does, say, to be clean. These are the fellows, I feel certain, whose defection has caused, and will further cause, the fall in the marriage rate. Your sex is being found out, my child, found out at long last by mine. When the discovery is quite complete Lord only knows what sort of a world we shall have!

I don’t suppose it has ever struck you before how nice we are to you—now has it?—how patient we are with your caprices, how tolerant of your tempers, how semi-blind to your deficiencies, how little and how rarely we use against you the strength, moral, mental, and physical, that is ours. An excellent French priest once advised me, as a cure for discontent, to spend half an hour three times a week in meditating upon my blessings. You do that, Alexa, and don’t forget that perhaps, on the whole, the chiefest of yours is the possession of a most wise and always a most loving

FATHER.

DRESS AND FASHION

DRESS AND FASHION

_Jan. 2, 19—._

MY DEAR ALEXA,—

Don’t be alarmed at getting a letter from me not in reply to one of yours. Nothing has happened. “All is silver grey,” as Andrea del Sarto says. I won’t add “placid and perfect with my art” as he does, because it is cheek to call one’s work perfect even when it is, but, at any rate, both I and my art are placid enough.

No, nothing has happened. That is the worst of it. When one reaches my age nothing ever does happen unless one makes it happen. When one is young adventures, excitements, thrills, come suddenly out of the void, thus adding to the ordinary joy of them the throb of the unexpected. But when one is older one has to fare forth out into the void and seek diligently adventures, excitements, thrills; and if one has one’s living to earn, and a whole lot of little things to see after, why then one hasn’t much time for excursions into the void.

This is a purely selfish letter. It is written to relieve my mind; by way of getting down in black and white some thoughts that have been twisting and twirling about like maggots in my brain all the afternoon. In that respect, at least, I am an artist, Alexa, and, forgive me, my daughter, in that same respect, you are not.

The artistic temperament is not, as fools of novelists appear to think, an itching to be singular or noticeable in any way, an inclination to wear ridiculous neck-ties, to omit to wash behind the ears, or to live with people to whom one is not married; and to quarrel with them. It is the desire, the invincible desire, to externalise and express in paint or pencil, in clay or marble, in musical sounds or in written words, one’s emotions, one’s thoughts, one’s aspirations, one’s dreams.

You, for instance, draw. For a girl of your years and training you draw rather well. But when you see a thing that appeals to you—a face, a landscape, a little bit of an interior, you do not ache and ache until you have got it down in pencil upon paper. You are quite content to keep it within you. I, when I get ever such a stupid idea in my head, am miserable until I see it before me in words, in words arranged as well as I know how to arrange them. I would rather, far rather, keep an aching tooth in my jaw than an aching idea in my head. And so, though my neck-ties are ever the correctest of their kind that Bond Street knows, and though I never do any of those other things peculiar to the artistic temperament of rubbishy fiction, I do claim to belong to the great company of artists.

By the way, I have often wondered what the author of the _Te Deum_ was about not to have added another line to it:—

“The great Brotherhood of Artists, throughout all the world: Praise
Thee.”

Every artist, in every bit of honest work he does, though he may not mean it or know it, praises God. How supremely well Kipling expressed the gist of our creed when he wrote in that exquisite _Envoi_ to “Life’s Handicap”; you remember it:—

“One instant’s toil to Thee denied
Stands all Eternity’s offence.”

And now to come down from the heights to the valley—I never could breathe freely on mountain tops, Alexa; that’s why I hate Switzerland so cordially. It is not the touring Anglican clergy and their impossible wives I object to so much; it is those appalling Alps. But, as I was going to say, I write this letter because I spent a whole half-hour this morning reading a woman’s paper. At least, I’m not sure it called itself a woman’s paper, it might have been a woman’s page in an ordinary paper. I don’t know where the thing has got to now, so I can’t refer to it. I found it on the hall table when I came down to breakfast.

Doesn’t it make you feel a good deal ashamed of your sex and of yourself, as one of it, when you come across a woman’s page in a newspaper? Doesn’t it make you feel pretty much as you would feel if you saw someone of your own standing behaving rudely at dinner? or being impolite to a child? Don’t you ask yourself, with something as near to a swear word as you can get, “Whom on earth is all the rest of the paper for then? Are women so small, so narrow, such children, such idiots as to have no interest in politics, in art, in science, in literature; in all the extraordinary doings of human beings all over the world, such as the rest of the paper discusses and records?”

“The Women’s Corner!” Think of it, Alexa, child of my heart! The corner into which the poor stunted, shrivelled, petty-minded creature must betake herself to read about dress. Pah!

Here your feminine intuition will tell you that I am in rather a bad temper. There, there, I don’t mean to sneer at feminine intuition. Heaven knows I have both profited and suffered from it enough, and more than enough in my time, and when the sum comes to be cast up it will be found, I daresay, that I have profited as much as I have suffered.

But I am in rather a bad temper with that woman’s paper, not because it was all about dress, but because it was all wrong about dress. I don’t mean wrong in the absurd details—I know nothing of them—but wrong in the essence, wrong in the soul of it.

Here anyone but you would say “What in the world does the man mean by talking about soul in an article on dress?” You won’t say it because you know—we have agreed about it often—that an article on anything whatever that has no soul in it, is not an article at all; it is just a bladder of rattling peas.

It is not because I despise or even think lightly of dress, that I am so unwontedly annoyed with the person who wrote all this slops. On the contrary, it is because I am fulfilled with the idea of the importance of dress and of the part it plays in the amenities and pleasures of life. You have often told me after we have been out together, or people have been here, and I have been admiring this lady or that, that I did not even know what she had on. Precisely. That was because she was well-dressed. Had she been badly dressed I should have known fast enough. The woman is well-dressed of whose costume you remember only the _ensemble_, what we artists call the total impression—an impression of colour and contour. Or sometimes of nothing even so definite as that, of fluffiness merely.

Now the writer of all this abominable fustian knew nothing of that, that elementary philosophy of dress. He, she, it—I don’t know what the sex of the creature was—thought all of the costume and nothing of the woman. With him, her, it, the woman was a thing to be worn with a costume, not the costume a thing for a woman to wear. You do see the tremendous difference, don’t you? But, of course, you do.

Really—but there, one must be tolerant. These people are flatly ignorant, and, moreover, they are the hirelings of others whose business it is to make money out of dress. That, nowadays, at anyrate, is the meaning of fashion in the restricted sense of the word. Fashion is not a mode of being beautiful or even of changing from one variety of beauty to another, or of changing to meet changing circumstances. It is a means of putting money into the pockets of dressmakers and manufacturers. These people are getting stronger and stronger, more and more arrogant.

Take a case in point. Once upon a time, not so long ago, every woman in our class had what was called “a set” of furs. It was horribly expensive to begin with, but it was taken care of and it lasted, oh, I don’t know how long. Of course, that didn’t suit the furriers and fur sellers—the fierce competition of commerce and all the silly rest of it—and so, though the wearing of furs is still the comfortable fashion, each season sees a change in the smaller fashion of the furs, the cut of them, the kind, and so on, and the women even in our class, who don’t adopt the latest thing, feel hopelessly uncomfortable and out of it. They either go cold, or wear cat-skin or rabbit-skin faked to look like something expensive, or spend money that they haven’t got.

With that rabbit-skin and cat-skin I have struck the note of fashion as it is in the suburbs, the provinces, and everywhere else except among the rich and idle people to whom money does not matter, the people who do nothing to make money, and so have most of it to spend. The designers for the big dressmakers design something that is perhaps, though by no means certainly, beautiful enough. If perchance it be beautiful, its beauty lives in the artistry and science of its fashioning, and the material of which it is made. Now the people at the top can purchase, without feeling it, the artistry, the science, the rare and costly material. But the others, you see, can’t.

Nevertheless, pricked and spurred by the low-down fashion journalists, they feel that life is a desert without the new thing in some shape or another. So they get it inartistically designed, unscientifically cut, and of some cheaper, commoner stuff. Result, they don’t look a bit like Duchesses after all, but only like what they are, silly and snobby women. These are hard words, Alexa, but I am cross to-day.

Fashion in its smaller sense, “the fashion” as it is forced upon women by the dressmakers and designers, as a card is forced by a sharper on a flat, is for nine people out of ten an accursed thing, a monstrous thing. It assumes that all women will look well dressed in the same way. Now, if anything is certain, it is that of any hundred women selected haphazard, not more than ten can dress in the same way and look anything but ridiculous. The human body is, as you learnt when you used to draw it at the Slade and at Colorossi’s, a subtle thing, and demands the subtlest treatment. There are idiosyncrasies of body as there are of mind. I don’t mean merely that some women are tall, some short, some thick, and others thin, some curvy and others angular. That has to be remembered, too, but I mean something more elusive than that.

Let us take a concrete case. You are not very different in height or form from your friend, Berta Roselli. You are not a bit prettier. A person just looking casually at you two—a second-rate milliner sort of person—would say that the same sort of costume would suit you both equally well. Yet how delightful you used to look in those frocks which you call, I think, “Princess” frocks, and how completely they took away the delightfulness from Berta. I told her so once in so many words when we were walking round the garden together, and she had the good sense never to wear them again. If you ask me why they enhanced your charm, and destroyed Berta’s, I can’t tell you. Perhaps there is no “why.”

Then again, colour. It drives the artistic soul furious to be told that “heliotrope is to be fashionable in the approaching season,” because one knows at once what one is in for. Think of heliotrope or of any other colour or tint in the universe worn beside every sort of complexion, with every sort of shade of hair! It makes one’s nerves stand on end like quills. There again, the rich women score because they can, and do, change their complexions and their hair to “match,” as this putrid paper calls it, the fashionable colour. The poorer women try to do the same thing, and look—well. Or don’t even try, and then!—

This is merely a grumbling letter, not a didactic essay, and so I will offer no advice in it. To offer advice one should be in a judicial mood, serene, detached! but I may just say this. The one fatal thing in dress is to wear anything because you happened to have admired it on someone else, and for that reason only. The one triumphant thing in the matter of dress is to remember that you are yourself and not that other person. In all other matters women seem to remember it easily enough. In the matter of dress only do they lose their sense of identity.

Now, Alexa, turn on me, do, and _riposte_ by telling me that men are every bit as bad; that they too are the slaves of fashion. Say things about my waistcoats if you like; I don’t care, for I have a crushing retort up my sleeve. Think of the things that tailor people have tried to force upon us and how miserably they have failed; how they have tried to make us go back to peg-tops, to wear coloured coats and knee-breeches, as evening dress. Think of these things and withhold the gibe. Or, don’t. I do not mind. Sedate in my sense of my sex’s immeasurable superiority,

I remain,

Your angry and æsthetic

FATHER.

A MORAL QUESTION

A MORAL QUESTION

_Jan. 15, 19—._

MY DEAR ALEXA,—

Your last letter interested and amused me vastly, as I know you intended it should. It is much the best thing in the way of writing you have ever done. I read and re-read and read it yet again after breakfast, and then I carefully, though regretfully, burnt it. One can spare oneself and others a lot of unhappiness by the simple process of burning letters, especially women’s letters, more especially still charming women’s charming letters. Indeed, the more charming the woman and the more charming the letter the more urgently do the flames clamour for their rights of destruction. Had anyone else read this last letter of yours, say, ten years hence, they would have formed an entirely false impression of you, and had even you read it yourself after that lapse of time you would have formed almost as false an impression of yourself. Almost, I say, not quite, for you, I fain hope, would remember the sort of man to whom it was written. And it is the character of the recipient even more than that of the writer which gives the keynote of every letter worth the reading. An intimate letter is the achievement of _two_ personalities—it is a kind of dialogue in which one of the interlocutors is silent, or rather, is heard only by the other. That is why published letters nearly always lack interest; we do not hear that other.

Now, if anyone but your understanding father had read that last letter of yours, they would have thought you “not quite a nice girl” to have repeated little bits of scandal which you have picked up in a house in which you are a welcome guest, and to have criticised so freely your hosts and their friends. They would have liked the letter, mind you—they would have chortled over it in pharisaical glee—I chortle, too, but I chortle not as the Pharisees chortle—but they would not have liked you, for they would have feared and distrusted you, as critics are always distrusted and feared by the stodgy, especially critics of life. They, you see, these hypothetical but now impossible readers of your letter, would not have known me—would not have known, as you do, that I enjoy scandal and appreciate criticism; and would therefore have failed to realise how dutiful a daughter you were in giving me the things I like.

Need I, to a girl of your perceptiveness, attempt to justify the enjoyment of scandal? Surely it is the exceptional, not the ordinary, which should and does interest us. If, for instance, one were to discover a pork butcher, who spent all the daylight hours in butchering pork, witching the midnight with an exquisite performance of Bach’s Chaconne on a Strad, one would be interested in the man, not because he was a pork butcher, but because he was a virtuoso who loved Bach and possessed a Strad. If Dr. Clifford were caught with a guitar serenading a lady’s maid in Gower Street, how one’s interest in the man would spring to life—how much of his windy rhetoric would instantly be forgotten? One side of our heads would condemn him, no doubt, but how the whole of our hearts would warm to the man? Ah, that one touch of nature! Forgive the banal quotation, but I don’t often quote from other people’s works, do I? Well, then, scandal is interesting because it is exceptional. And conduct that is not exceptional is not scandal. No one would call the improprieties of Messalina scandals; they were just the commonplace occurrences of her daily life. Now, these four persons of whose doings you tell me are made interesting to me now by the very fact that I have always held them to be of the properest sect of the proper. Next time I meet Mrs ⸺ (I had better omit the name) I shall look at her from an entirely different point of view. I shall make an effort to talk to the woman, whereas, as you know, last time I took her down to dinner I devoted myself in esurient silence to the entrées. See now, my daughter, what a kindly act you have done her in repeating that little morsel of scandal. For, as you know, when I do try to talk—really to talk—I generally succeed rather well. You have assured the dear and erring lady at least one pleasant dinner party.

But you ask me—or seem to ask me, though you do not put your query in so many words, what ought to be your own attitude to the lady in question—should you continue “to know” her, as the phrase goes, in the future. Of course, you can’t help knowing her just now, for a guest must needs be courteous to fellow guests, or leave the host’s house as quickly as is compatible with politeness. Very well, Alexa, let us go into this matter for a moment. What do we, you and I, know of this lady, “know for certain,” as the phrase goes? We know her to be a kindly if not an obtrusively intelligent person. We know, if you come to think of it, quite a lot of nice, kind things she has done for other people, things she might have left undone and caused no remark, superfluously kind things, that is. We know her to be—for we have seen her in her own home—a devoted and efficient mother—alas that the two terms should not be synonymous—to her little children. Judging by her husband’s conduct to her, he finds her an eminently satisfactory wife. Personally, though I have never heard her say a brilliant or even a clever thing, I have never heard her say an unkind one. As to this other matter of which you tell me, we are not quite sure that it is true, are we? A thing that is neither confessed nor proved is doubtful, and according to the wholesome custom of English law—and English law, broadly speaking, is English common sense—the accused has always the benefit of the doubt. But, you seem to hint, you yourself are “morally certain” that it is true. Moral certainties lead often to immoral judgments, Alexa, and, like moral victories, are always eminently unsatisfying. But let us take it for granted that it is true. What then? It is assuredly nothing that immediately concerns you or your relations with the woman, is it? You do not catch yourself desiring to follow her example in any way, do you? You find no trace of her backslidings in her conversations with you? So far as you can perceive, and you have pretty sharp eyes, my daughter, it does not affect her life or manners in any way whatever. You told me you know, that it came upon you as an overwhelming surprise. You may reply that such a thing “_must_” in some way affect a woman’s life. I reply that it is not with what _must_, but with what _does_ perceptibly happen that we in this practical work-a-day world only are concerned. We do well to leave _musts_ to the hereafter.

In asking yourself whether you shall or shall not continue “to know” this lady, you are really and essentially asking yourself whether you shall act as judge, jury and executioner to a person accused of an offence against current convention, or, yes, if you like, against current morality. But I would point out to you that even in Law, which is at best but a rough and ready attempt to secure justice, the peculiar facts of the offence, the temptations that led up to it, are taken into some sort of account. The plea of extenuating circumstances has weight. Moreover, the accused is allowed to speak in his defence either by his own lips or those of skilled counsel. Now your court, the court which you in secret hold, and where you alone are judge, jury, prosecutor, and witnesses—your court knows nothing, and can know nothing, of peculiar facts, and of special temptations—it can mitigate nothing on account of extenuating circumstances, because it is wholly ignorant of their existence or non-existence. The accused’s lips are sealed, and there is no counsel to plead for her. Do you think, then, that a court so constituted is at all likely to get anywhere near to justice in its decisions? How would you like to be tried, and executed, by such a court, if you were charged with stealing a yard of ribbon?

You may reply, and I think you will, for you are a persistent little dialectician when you like, that an analogy is not an argument. And, besides, that in talking of “execution” I exaggerate: that anything so unimportant a person as yourself may do can matter but little to the lady. No, perhaps not, but it matters a good deal to you, child, and it is you with whom I am concerned. An unjust act hurts the doer, hurts especially if it be a stupidly unjust act. After it he will be a trifle stupider, blunter, more prejudiced than he was before. There is nothing roots itself—no, not even the horse-radish in our garden—so easily, and is so hard to eradicate, as prejudice. Now prejudiced and strong you may be, my child, but you can’t be prejudiced and delightful, and, as I have so often told you, above all things I want you to be delightful.

So far you are delightful, and you are strong, too, and it is because you are strong that I am going to say one thing more on this matter. The moral code of society is not equally valid in all its clauses. Some are of more importance and significance than others. Those which say we must not murder and we must not steal are of immeasurable importance, because they apply not to this time or that, or to that place or this, but to _all_ times and to every place. A society which permitted or winked to any extent at murder or theft would cease, almost at once, to be a society. We are here now living in comparative comfort and security because societies in the past forbade murder and theft; therefore the commands which treat of these offences are of what we philosophical old buffers call universal validity. But there are other commandments in the moral code of the day which are only “of the day,” as it were. Time was when they were not—places are where they are not, and possibly time will come again when they will not be. The morality which they seek to maintain is never more than the morality of a phase in human evolution. It may be valid _for that phase_, but it has not universal validity. Now, judgments and actions based on universal validity must needs be ever so much more assured than judgments and actions based on phasal validity, if you will allow the phrase to pass. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want to minimise the importance of the rules and regulations which are “only of the day,” for, after all, that day is the day in which we live. Still, you see there is a difference, isn’t there? Yes, and it is just one of those differences of which a wise and delightful young woman should take count.

Of course, I have not nearly exhausted my subject, but I have very nearly exhausted myself, and

I am your tired

FATHER.

THE LIMITS OF FLIRTATION

THE LIMITS OF FLIRTATION

_Feb. 20, 19—._

MY DEAR ALEXA,—

What a very short note! Its brevity and its interrogativeness give it almost the urgency of a telegram. And yet how am I to answer it, how am I even to begin to answer it in less than half a dozen pages of quarto?

I will not remind you of the old saying that a certain sort of person can ask more questions in five minutes than a wise man can answer in a lifetime. I will not remind you, I say, because you are not the sort of person the old saying means, and I feel sure that when you asked your question you did not do it just to annoy, but because for some reason or another you really wanted to know. Was it personal, that reason? Because, if so, I think, perhaps, on the whole you had better come home.

What, you ask me, are the limits of flirtation? Where does it begin; where end?

I wish you hadn’t used the word: it is a word I happen intensely to dislike, to dislike with one of those prejudices of which we can never give a satisfactory account. I think, perhaps, I dislike it because it always brings before me a mental image of one of my own sex making a fool or a rogue of himself. And yet I cannot blame you, for I myself have been quite unable to find a synonym for it.

“Coquetry” is a pretty word, but coquetry, I quite recognise, is a different thing. Coquetry is exclusively feminine. Now it takes two to make a flirtation, and one of them must not be a woman. And then, after all, the word has a worthy ancestry.

Do you know who invented it? A dozen pairs of gloves to one you don’t? It was that greatest of all gentlemen that ever were, Lord Chesterfield, and he, like the gallant fellow he was, modestly attributed it to some unnamed lady of his acquaintance.

I came across it quite a little while ago in Volume XVI. of my _British Essayists_. You know them, those little books bound in expensive calf with red labels, which nearly fill a whole bookshelf in the library, and which you always refuse to open because you say they look so dull. Well, in No. 101 of _The World_, dated December 5, 1754, Lord Chesterfield is praising your sex for the good service it has done to the English tongue; and I can’t think how he could! “I never see a pretty mouth opening to speak,” he says, “but I expect, and am seldom disappointed, some new improvement of our language.”

Happy times! Happy man! If only he could have been here the other day when the Darkleigh girls called. Their entire vocabulary consisted of one word, “ripping.” No, I do them wrong. There was another, “rag.” And yet what an extremely charming girl Muriel is, isn’t she? And, after all, why should a woman be a dictionary?

But to return to Lord Chesterfield. He goes on to say:—

“I assisted at the birth of that most significant word
‘flirtation,’ which dropped from the most beautiful mouth in
the world, and which has since received the sanction of our
most accurate Laureate in one of his comedies. Some inattentive
and undiscerning people have, I know, taken it to be a term
synonymous with coquetry; but I lay hold of this opportunity
to undeceive them, and eventually to inform Mr Johnson that
flirtation is short of coquetry and intimates only the first
hints of approximation, which subsequent coquetry may reduce to
those preliminary articles that commonly end in a definitive
treaty.”

I have quoted Chesterfield merely for the sake of historic interest, not because his definition is much to the point just now. Since his time the word flirtation has changed its meaning, just as the thing has changed its character. It means a good deal more to-day than those “first hints of approximation.” Flirtation with us does not end (except by some calamitous accident) in the “definitive treaty” of marriage. The proof of which is that when it does we usually say, or think, “Oh, then it wasn’t a flirtation after all, it was serious;” implying, of course, that that which is serious is not flirtation.

Not but what stupid people among us misuse the word abominably. You will sometimes hear a woman accused of flirting with a man when she has been merely making herself as delightful as she knows how to him; doing her simple duty to herself and to him, that is.

But we need not trouble ourselves, you and I, as to what stupid people say or think. We agreed that we wouldn’t, a long time ago, you remember. I have noticed, too, that people who say things about us always are stupid—which is one to us, isn’t it?

No, no, flirtation to-day may go a long way beyond those first hints of approximation and still remain flirtation, without reaching those limits you talk of. It may ... but perhaps only concrete instances have value in a discussion of this sort, so let me give you one. A day or two ago, I went, rather late in the afternoon, to the Exhibition of Old Masters now on in Burlington House. I wish you had been there too; there is gorgeous Sir Joshua, which you would have knelt down and worshipped. I should have done it myself but for a sense of humour and a touch of rheumatism in the knee. Well, in the water-colour gallery I came upon a man I know and you know, with a woman I know and so do you. They were not looking at the drawings, they were sitting on a seat between two screens. My almost feminine intuition (don’t jeer) told me that they had not looked at a picture since they had passed the turnstile. However, please understand, Alexa, that there was not the slightest harm in those two people being where they were on that afternoon.

At our time of day and amongst our set, I should hope, any man might go to any picture gallery with any woman and escape censure. But the point about these two people was this. When they saw me, and saw that I saw them, they seemed embarrassed. And then the man gave me a look which meant, if ever a look meant anything, “I know you’re a decent chap, and I am confident you will hold your tongue,” and the lady did not look at me at all, she fidgeted with the edge of her veil. The veil, by the way, of course, gave the whole thing away. It was thickish. People who want to see pictures don’t wear thick veils. Now, that embarrassment, that look of the man’s at me, that little nervous gesture of the lady’s, told me that here was a flirtation. Nothing more than a flirtation so far. I am confident of that. But a flirtation, mind you, that had almost reached the limits.

An understanding, a secret understanding, an understanding from which the rest of the world is excluded, is of the very essence of flirtation. The _entente_, the agreement, may never have been made by words spoken in corners, or written in notes, but it must at least have been made in looks or, no, perhaps not by anything so definite as they, by the creation of that most impalpable but most real thing, an atmosphere, an emotional atmosphere.

When does a flirtation begin, then? It begins directly she has succeeded in convincing him (of course you may reverse the sexes) that he is more attractive to her than any of the other men about. Mind, I say in convincing him. Until he is convinced the thing has not begun; it is only an attempt at a flirtation—and to fail in such an attempt is, with one exception, the most disastrous defeat a woman can sustain. No woman can encounter two beatings of that sort and retain her self-esteem. Her _amour propre_ is irreparably ruined. A man, on the other hand, can survive any number of rebuffs and come up smiling to face the next; for he can always comfort himself with the thought that it was the lady’s prudence and not his own unattractiveness that was responsible for the licking.

A flirtation must be without serious intent. If one of the parties to it have anything more definite in view, consciously in view, then he or she is not flirting; it is a one-sided affair. It is in no way destructive of the accuracy of my definition that most affairs are one-sided affairs.

There may be in a flirtation, there nearly always is, a sort of subtle subconsciousness of delightful possibilities, of dangerously delightful possibilities, but that is all there may be; and it is just these vague possibilities that give the salt to the dish.

Flirtation then you see, Alexa, is, like virtue, its own reward. That, I think, is the only respect in which it does resemble virtue. Like art, it must exist only for its own sake; and it is remarkably like art. Indeed, it is no inconsiderable part of the art of life. The object of art, as Pater says somewhere, is to render radiant, to intensify, our moments. That and nothing else is the object, so far as it has an object, of flirtation.

Of course it gratifies our vanity, and of all gratifications, or nearly all, the gratification of vanity is the sweetest, the one with least alloy or unpleasant after-taste. Vanity suffers from hunger, but never from indigestion, no, nor from satiety. There are few things in this world which give a man, who is a man and not a pudding, such a tingling thrill of pleasure as the consciousness that a woman, an ordinarily discreet woman, has run the ever-so-slightest risk of compromising herself for his sake.

A woman once told me—quite a nice woman, Alexa, not a cat, nothing like a cat—that life’s height was the knowledge that she could raise a man to the summits or cast him down to the depths, by giving or withholding a glance as she left the dinner-table for the drawing-room. So you see flirtation has its points as a form of sport.

Obviously then, as I said, there must be an understanding, a tacit, if temporary, alliance between the pair. They must have made a little circle for themselves, a little circle in which they two move alone, from which the rest of the world is excluded, as it were, by a burning bush. There may be a _ménage à trois_, indeed, I am told that the _ménage à trois_ is one of the commonest of social phenomena, but a flirtation _à trois_ there can never be. A woman may flirt with two men, or a man with two women, but neither of the two must know of the other’s existence or the thing falls to pieces.

It is in truth a sort of exercise preliminary to the duel of sex. The combatants are combatants only by courtesy; they fence with the buttons on the foils. So long as the game is played according to the rules, there is likely to be naught more seriously discommoding than a scratch or a tiny little blue bruise which in a day or two will disappear. But, and here is the spice of it, at any moment one of the buttons may come off by accident, or be taken off by fraud, and then—well, then certainly a garment may be torn to rags, possibly a heart may be pierced.

Where does flirtation end? you ask. Well, I can tell you where it never ends. It never ends in a row. Never, at any rate, when he or she has more brains than a guinea-pig. Of course, with downright fools there is no telling. If there be ever so slight a row, ever so faint a scandal, then there has been something more than a flirtation. The limits have been passed; a button, somehow or other, has come off a foil. When somebody is trying to get back somebody’s letters somebody has leaped the limits: be sure of that.

Miss Rhoda Broughton, an author whom young women of to-day are a little apt to slight, makes Sarah in _Belinda_ say:—“I may be a flirt, but thank heaven in the whole length and breadth of Europe there exists not a scrap of my handwriting.” Or words to this effect. May be a flirt forsooth! Of course she was a flirt, and a flirt of accomplishment, or she could never truthfully have made the boast.

But the limits? Well, they are like most other limits that determine the conduct of men and women. They are shifting limits, they change from age to age, and from climate to climate; nay, more than that, from social set to social set. Judging from what I hear on the top and bottom levels of our present society there is no fault to find with their narrowness; and even with us though they may be not so wide as a church door (horrid simile that; a church should never even be thought of in connection with a flirtation) they will do, they will serve.

Perhaps you want me to be practical though. Well, here goes then. Secret assignations should be avoided as beyond the limits, so should the underground post. You know what I mean by the underground post; letters sent to clubs or to post-offices.

Dark corners at dances? Well—yes. A dark corner may just be inside the boundary, but a clasped hand in that dark corner is well over it. But by the way, Alexa, on the whole it seems not wise in me to set out these limits for you, because the limits of flirtation are also the perilous edges of—find the word for me in the _Thesaurus_. There is plenty of room well within those limits for you to entertain yourself, and others, in security. Keep away from the limits, for, as I said, they are vague, apt sometimes, in emotional moments, to become blurred, invisible even perhaps. When a girl of your tender years gets near to the limits she is likely to call for the prompt and most disagreeable intervention of a, and particularly of

Your, stern and relentless,

Though never heavy,

FATHER.

MEN’S LOVE

MEN’S LOVE

_Jan. 20, 19—._

MY DEAR ALEXA,—

Your appetite for knowledge does you credit. It is inherited, doubtless. And how comprehensive it is! You wish you knew all about men, do you? A moderate wish; a wish that if realised would make you empress of the world. Yes, that and nothing less than that is the destiny of the woman, when she arrives, who knows all about men. We shall not see her just yet though, and when, if ever we do, then, as Swinburne’s distressful lover says:

“Content you, I shall not be there.”