University of Virginia Library

18. CHAPTER XVIII.
THE YOUNG LADY PHILOSOPHER.

SEATED, reading by a shaded study-lamp, was a
young woman of what I should call the Jeanie
Deans order—one whose whole personal appearance
indicated that sort of compact, efficient union of energy
and simplicity characteristic of the Scottish heroine.
Her hair, of a pretty curly brown, was cut short, à la Rosa
Bonheur; her complexion glowed with a sort of a wholesome
firmness, indicative of high health; her large, serious grey
eyes had an expression of quiet resolution, united with
careful observation. Her figure inclined to the short, stout
and well-compacted order, which gave promise of vitality
and power of endurance—without pretensions to beauty.
There was a wholesome, thoughtful cheerfulness and good
humor in the expression of the face that made it decidedly
prepossessing and attractive.

The furniture of the room, too, was in contrast with all
the other appointments of the house. It was old and worn,
and of that primitive kind that betokened honest and
respectable mediocrity. There was a quaint, old-fashioned
writing-desk, with its array of drawers and pigeon-holes;
there were old slippery wooden arm-chairs, unrelieved by
cushions; while the floor was bare, excepting in front of
the fire, where it was covered by a large square of what New
England housekeepers call rag-carpet. The room, in fact,
was furnished like the sitting-room of an old New England
farm-house. A cheerful, bountiful wood-fire, burning on
a pair of old-fashioned brass andirons, added to the resemblance.

“You see, Mr. Henderson,” said Miss Eva, when I had
been introduced and seated, “you are now in the presence
of Miss Van Arsdel proper. This room is Papa's and Ida's

joint territory, where their own tastes and notions have
supreme sway; and so you see it is sacred to the memories
of the past. There is all the old furniture that belonged to
papa when he was married. Poor man! he has been pushed
out into grandeur, step by step, till this was all that
remained, and Ida opened an asylum for it. Do you know,
this is the only room in the house Papa cares much for. You
see, her was born on a farm, dear gentleman, and he has an
inveterate yearning after primitive simplicity—huckleberries
and milk, you know, and all that. Don't this look
like the old `keeping-room' style?”

“Yes,” said I, “it looks like home. I know rooms just
like it.”

“But I like these old primitive things,” said Ida. “I like
hardness and simplicity. I am sick to death of softness
and perfumed cushions and ease. We women are sweltered
under down beds, and smothered with luxuries, in our modern
day, till all the life dies out of us. I want to live while
I live, and to keep myself in such trim that I can do something—and
I won't pet myself nor be petted.”

“There,” said Eva, laughing, “blood will tell; there's the
old Puritan broken loose in Ida. She don't believe any of
their doctrines, but she goes on their track. She's just like
a St. Bernard dog that she brought home once. As soon as
snow came, he was wild to run out and search in it, and used
to run off whole days in the woods, just because his ancestors
were trained to hunt travelers. Ida is as bent on testifying
and going against the world as any old Covenanter.”

“The world needs going against,” said Ida. “By the
by, Mr. Henderson, you must allow me to thank you for
your article on the `Woman of our Times,' in the Milky
Way. It is bracing, and will do good.”

“And I,” said Eva, kindling with a sort of flame-like vivacity,
“have been perfectly dying to tell you that you don't
know us fashionable girls, and that we are not, after all,
such poor trash as you seem to think. All the out-of-jointness
of society is not our fault.”

“I protest, Miss Eva,” said I, astonished at the eagerness
of her manner. “I'm sure I don't know what I have said to
give that impression.”

“Oh, I dare say not. You have only used the good stock
phrases and said the usual things. You reformers and moralists,
and all that have got a way of setting us girls down
as sinners as a matter of course, so that you never think
when you do it. The `Dolls of fashion,' the `Butterflies,'
&c., &c., are used to point the moral and adorn the tale.
The girl of the period is the scapegoat for all the naughty
things going. Now, I say the girl of the period isn't a particle
worse than the boy of the period; and I think reformers
had better turn their attention to him.”

“But I don't remember,” said I, astonished and confused
at the sudden vivacity of this attack, “that I said anything.”

“Oh, yes, but I do. You see it's the party that's hit that
knows when a blow is struck. You see, Mr. Henderson, it
isn't merely you, but everybody, from the London Spectator
down, when they get on their preaching-caps, and come
forth to right the wrongs of society, begin about us—our
dressiness, our expensiveness, our idleness, our extravagance,
our heartlessness. The men, poor, dear creatures,
are led astray and ruined by us. It's the old story of Adam:
`The woman beguiled me.”'

“You see,” said Ida, laughing, “Eva's conscience troubles
her; that's why she's so sensitive.”

“Well, that's the truth,” said Eva. “I'm in the world, and
Ida has gone out of it; and so she can sit by, all serene, when
hits are made at us, and say, `I told you so.' But, you see, I
am in, and am all the while sure that about half what thy
say of us is true, and that makes me sensitive when they
say too much. But, I insist upon it, it isn't all true; and
if it is, it isn't our fault. We are in the world just as we are
in a railroad-car, and we can't help its carrying us on, even
if we don't like the places it takes us through.”

“Unless you get out of it,” said Ida.

“Yes; but it takes courage to get out alone, at some desolate
way station, and set up your tent, and make your way'
and have everybody in the cars screaming remonstrances or
laughing at you. Ida has the courage to do it, but I haven't.
I don't believe in myself enough to do it, so I stay in the
car, and wish I didn't, and wish we were all going a better
way than we do.”

“No,” said Ida; “women are brought up in a way to
smother all the life out of them. All literature from the
earliest ages teaches them that it is graceful to be pretty
and helpless; they aspire to be superficial and showy. They
are directed to look on themselves as flowers—

“Well,” said Eva, flushing, “wasn't it a man that wrote
that? and don't they always misunderstand us? We are
soft—we are weak—we do love beauty, and ease, and comfort;
but there is a something in us more than they give
us credit for. Where is that place in Carlyle?” she said,
rising with a hasty impulse, and taking down a volume,
and running rapidly over the leaves—“Oh, here it is!” and
she read with energy from Carlyle's Hero Worship:

“Now,” she said, her face glowing, and bringing down her
little fist with emphasis, “that is true of women as well as

men. They wrong woman greatly who say she is to be
seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death,
are allurements that act on the heart of woman. Now, Mr.
Henderson, every woman that is a woman, feels this in the
depths of her heart, and it is this feeling suppressed that is
at the bottom of a great deal of unhappiness in woman's
life. You men have your chance to express it—that is your
great good fortune. You are called to be heroes—your
hour comes—but we are buried under eternal common-places
and trifles.”

“Yet, Miss Eva,” said I, “I don't think we are so very
much better off than you. The life of the great body of men
is a succession of mere ignoble drudgeries, with nothing
great or inspiring. Unless we learn to ennoble the common-place
by a heroic spirit, most of us must pass through
life with no expression of this aspiration; and I think that
more women succeed in doing this than men—in fact, I think
it is the distinctive prerogative of woman to idealize life by
shedding an ennobling spirit upon its very trifles.”

“That is true,” she said, frankly; “but I confess it never
occurred to me; yet don't you think it harder to be heroic
in every-day affairs?”

“Certainly; but those that can inspire common-place
drudgery with noble and heroic meanings are the true
heroes. There was a carpenter once in Nazareth who
worked thirty years quietly at his bench; but who doubts
that every stroke of that work was inspired and heroic, as
much as the three public years that followed? And there
are women, like him, toiling in poverty—hard-working
wives, long-suffering mothers, whose every breath is heroic.
There can be no common-place where such noble creatures
live and suffer.”

“Yes, Mr. Henderson,” said Ida, “heroism can be in any
life that is a work-life—any life which includes energy and
self-denial. But fashionable life is based on mere love of
ease. All it seeks is pleasurable sensation and absence of
care and trouble, and it starves this heroic capability; and

that is the reason, as Eva says, why there is so much
repressed unhappiness in women. It is the hunger of starving
faculties. What are all these girls and women looking
for? Amusement, excitement. What do they dread more
than anything? Effort, industry, self-denial. Not one of
them can read a serious book through—not because they
are not able, but because it takes an effort. They read
nothing but serial stories, and if there is much thought in
them, they skip it, to get at the story. All the education
they get in schools lies idle; they do nothing with it, as a
general thing. They neither read, write, nor speak their
French, Italian, or German—and what is the use of having
got them? Men study languages as a key to literature, and
use literature for some purpose; women study only to forget.
It does not take four languages and all the ologies to
enable them to dance the German and compose new styles
of trimming. They might do all they do equally as well
without these expensive educations as with—”

“There now, you have got sister Ida on her pet topic,”
said Eva, with heightened color; “she will take up her
prophecy now, and give it to us wicked daughters of Zion;
but, after all, it only makes one feel worried and bad, and
one doesn't know what to do. We don't make the world;
we are born into and find it ready made. We find certain
things are customs—certain things are expected of us—and
we begin to say A, and then we must say B, and so on
through the whole alphabet. We don't want to say B, but
we must because we have said A. It isn't every one that is
brave and strong enough to know where to stop, and face the
world, and say, `No, I will not do it.' We must keep step
with our neighbors.”

“Well,” said Ida, “who is it that says, `Be not conformed
to the world'?”

“Yes—I know,” said Eva; “there's the Bible—there are
all the lessons and prayers and hymns of the Church all
going one way, and our lives all going the other—all our
lives—everybody's life—even nice people's lives—all go the

other way; except now and then one. There's our new
rector, now, he is beginning to try to bring us up to live as
the Church directs; but mamma and Aunt Maria, and all
of them, cry out that he is High Church, and going to
Popery, and all that; they say that if one is to live as he
says, and go out to prayers morning and evening, and to
Holy Communion every Sunday, it will just upset our whole
plan of life, that one might as well go into a convent—and
so it will. One can't be in parties all night, and go to
prayers every morning; one can't go through that awful
Holy Communion every Sunday, and live as we generally
do through the week. All our rector is trying to do, is
simply to make a reality of our profession; he wants us to
carry out in good faith what is laid down in the Prayer-book;
but you see we can't do it without giving up the
world as we have it arranged now. For my part, I'm going
to the daily services in Lent, if I don't any other time,
and though it does make me feel dreadfully wicked and
uncomfortable.”

“Oh, you poor child!” said Ida; “why haven't you
strength to do as you please?”

“Why haven't I the arm of a blacksmith? why can't I
walk ten miles? There are differences of power in mind
as well as body,” said Eva.

The conversation was interrupted at this moment by Mr.
Van Arsdel, who entered quietly, with his spectacles and
newspapers.

“The children are having lively times in there,” he said,
“and I thought I'd just come here and sit where it's quiet,
and read my papers.”

“Papa says that every evening,” said Eva.

“Well, the fact is, Mr. Henderson,” said he, with a confiding
sort of simplicity, “Ida and I feel at home in here,
because it's just the little old place wife and I had when
we began. You see, these are all my old things that we
first went to housekeeping with, and I like them. I didn't
want to have them sent off to auction, if they are old and
clumsy.”

“And he should have them, so he should, Pa-sey dear,” said
Eva, caressingly, putting her arm round his neck. “But
come, Mr. Henderson, I suppose the gay world outside will
expect us.”

I had risen and was looking over the library. It was
largely composed of modern scientific and physiological
works.

“You see my light reading,” said Ida, with a smile.

“Ida's books are a constant reproach to me,” said Eva;
“but I dip in now and then, and fish up some wonderful
pearl out of them; however, I confess to just the fatal laziness
she reprobates—I don't go through anything.”

“Well, Mr. Henderson, we won't keep you from the world
of the parlors,” said Ida; “but consider you have the entrée
here whenever you want a quiet talk; and we will be
friends,” she said, stretching out her hand with the air of a
queen.

“You honor me too much, Miss Van Arsdel,” said I.

“Come now, Mr. Henderson, we can't allow our principal
literary lion to be kept in secret places,” said Miss Eva
“You are expected to walk up and down and show yourself;
there are half a dozen girls to whom I have promised
to present you.”

And in a moment I found myself standing in a brilliant
circle of gay tropical birds of fashion, where beauty, or
the equivalent of beauty, charmingness, was the rule, and
not the exception. In foreign lands, my patriotic pride
had often been fed by the enthusiasm excited by my countrywomen.
The beauty and grace of American women
their success in foreign circles, has passed into a proverb;
and in a New York company of young girls one is really
dazzled by prettiness. It is not the grave, grand, noble type
of the Madonna and the Venus di Milo, but the delicate,
brilliant, distracting prettiness of young birds, kittens,
lambs, and flowers—something airy and fairy—belonging
to youth and youthful feeling. You see few that promise to
ripen and wax fairer in middle life; but almost all are like

delicate, perfectly-blossomed flowers—fair, brilliant and
graceful, with a fragile and evanescent beauty.

The manners of our girls have been criticised, from the
foreign standpoint, somewhat severely. It is the very nature
of republican institutions to give a sort of unconventional
freedom to its women. There is no upper world of
court and aristocracy to make laws for them, or press down
a framework of etiquette upon them. Individual freedom
of opinion and action pervades every school; it is breathed
in the very air, and each one is, in a great degree, a law unto
herself. Every American girl feels herself in the nobility;
she feels adequate to the situation, and perfectly poised in
it. She dares do many things not permitted in foreign
lands, because she feels strong in herself, and perfectly sure
of her power.

Yet he who should presume on this frank generosity of
manner, will find that Diana has her arrows; and that her
step is free only because she knows her strength, and understands
herself perfectly, and is competent to any situation.

At present, the room was full of that battledore-and-shuttlecock
conversation, in which everything in heaven above
or earth beneath is bantered to and fro, flitting and flying
here and there from one bright lip to another.

“Now, really and truly, girls, are you going to the early
services this Lent? Oh, Mr. Selwyn is such a good man!
and wasn't his pastoral letter beautiful? We really ought
to go. But, girls, I can't get up—indeed, I can't; do you
know, it's dreadful—seven o'clock—only think of it. You
won't go, Eva?”

“Yes, I shall.”

“I lay you a pair of gloves you won't, now,” quoth a
mouth, adorned with a long pair of waxed moustaches of a
true Imperial type.

“See if I don't.”

“Oh, mamma says I mustn't try,” said another; “I haven't
the strength.”

“And I tell Eva she can't do it,” said Mrs. Van Arsdel.

“Eva is always over-doing; she worked herself to death in
a mission class last year. The fact is, one can't do these
things, and go into society.”

“But what's the use of society, mamma?” said Eva.

“Oh, well; we can't all turn into monks and nuns, you
know; and that's what these modern High Church doings
would bring us to. I'm a good, old-fashioned Episcopalian;
I believe in going to church on Sundays—and that's all we
used to hear about.”

“Do you know, Mr. Fellows, I saw you at St. Alban's,”
said Miss Alice.

“On your knees, too,” said Miss Eva.

“Do you believe in bowing to the altar?” said a third; “I
think it's quite Popish.”

“Girls, what are going to be worn for hats this spring?
have you been to Madame De Tullerigs? I declare it's a
shame! but Lent is just the busiest time about one's
clothes, one must have everything ready for Easter, you
know. How do you like the new colors, Mr. Fellows?”

“What! the hell-fire colors?” said Jim.

“Oh, horrors! You dreadful creature, you ought to be
ashamed of yourself:” screamed in four or five voices.

“Am ashamed—sackcloth and ashes, and all that; eat
nothing but codfish,” said Jim. “But that's what they
call 'em, any way—hell-fire colors.”

“I never did hear such a profane creature. Girls, isn't
he dreadful?”

“I say, Miss Alice,” said Jim, “do you go to confession
up there? 'Cause, you see, it that thing is getting about, I
think I'll turn priest.”

“I think you ought to go to confession,” said she.

“I shall in the good times coming, when we have lady
priests.”

“Oh, Mr. Henderson, do you believe in women's rights?”

“Certainly.”

“Well, for my part, I have all the rights I want,” said Miss
Alice.

“I should think you did,” said Jim Fellows; “but it's
hard on us.”

“Well, I think that is all infidelity,” said another;—“goes
against the Bible. Do you think women ought to speak in
public?”

“Ristori and Fanny Kemble, for instance,” said I.

“Oh, well—they are speaking other people's words; but
their own?”

“Why not as well as in private?”

“Oh, because—why, I think it's dreadful; don't you?”

“I can't perceive why. I am perfectly charmed to hear
women speak, in public or private, who have anything good
or agreeable to say.”

“But the publicity is so shocking!”

“Is it any more public than waltzing at the great public
balls?”

“Oh, well, I think lecturing is dreadful; you'll never convince
me. I hate all those dreadful, raving, tearing, stramming
women.”

In which very logical and consecutive way the leading
topics of the age were elegantly disposed of; and at eleven
o'clock I found myself out on the pavement with the inexhaustible
Jim, who went singing and whistling by my side
as fresh as a morning blackbird. My head was in a pretty
thorough whirl; but I was initiated into society,—to what
purpose shall hereafter appear.