Aside from the women of commerce there are, of course, many secret
rebels--now and then only does one make her exit from society through the
courts. The vast majority of Anglo-Saxons in whatever clime or capital,
suppress their "unrefined" appetites or vagrant fancies--which are
vibrations from the wheel; sometimes hard jerks when the presiding genius
is more than commonly out of patience--and rise to serene heights or grow
morbid and irritable according to the strength or the meagerness of their
equipment; or the nature of their resources. A cultivated resource is a
persistent fiction that life is as it ought to be, not as it is, and it
is no plan of theirs to read books or witness plays that might carve and
populate a new groove in their brains.
Let no one imagine that this class will become more "enlightened,"
"broader," as time goes on. Not for a century at least. Mind has made too
great a success of this product; she has practically achieved a complete
triumph over the lady at the wheel. It is this class that has made
civilization progress, the solid thing it is to date. The excrescences, the
deserters from the normal, scintillating or subtle, may be tolerated for
the spice they give to life but they will never rule,
Possibly they do not mind. Life Is made up of compromises and
compensations.
V
American women in youth, of the visibly reputable world, may be freely
divided into two classes, the oversexed and those that seem cold to
themselves and others until they are well into the period of their second
youth--between twenty-four and thirty; and a not inconsiderable number are
so and permanently.
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