The Vanishing Lady

DECEMBER, 1911

I

’I HAVE had a most interesting, not to say exciting, season,’ the lady wrote, ‘but it has left me somewhat bewildered. You know I have been out of the world for many years. Going down to the old home after my husband’s early death, I was detained there by one duty after another. I traveled occasionally, but my visits to this city, that I knew in my girlhood and married life, were brief, until my niece insisted that I spend this winter with her here. Of course the town has grown enormously. I came expecting to find it changed, but quite unprepared for the kind of changes I really found. The old names still mean something here, but not the old ideas.

‘The people are so different! Would it sound priggish if I said that I find a very heterogeneous society where I left a more or less homogeneous one? Everybody in it in those days was not cultivated and Christian, exactly, but seemed to be striving toward that desirable condition. Men and women alike were judged to fall short of the standard if they did not attain those ends. This gave us a definite unity of principle and atmosphere.

‘I may be mistaken, but it quite seems to me that, in Bessie’s very upto-date world, Christianity is nowhere and cultivation leagues behind that! I don’t mean, merely, that most people now pay pew-rent without going to church, or that elderly gentlemen have ceased to quote Horace. What I mean is that life no longer centres about those things; refinement, taste, spiritual qualities are no longer thought especially desirable. The Lady and the Gentleman are no longer what they were.

‘As a minor illustration of the things that are different, it used to be thought ill-bred to talk about what people “had.” Appparently it is so no longer. People all have more money, but less of the things money is good for. And — really, what is the use? I do not see what these people are trying to do. I do not see where they are going. I do not see, even, where their “fun ” comes in! The lady of leisure no longer has any leisure. She races from one thing to another (beginning with card-parties soon after breakfast) like a hunted hare. When she “rides” for pleasure, her joy consists in going so fast that it is impossible to see anything but the speedometer, and she often talks so rapidly that there is no opportunity for a response. She has no time to read, or converse, or think,or grow — you know those were the uses of leisure once!

’Of course I meet scattered individuals of types more familiar to me, and Bessie has some friends who are fine and thoughtful women; but they, too, are rushed to death, and have not the time to be charming and restful, as well as admirable and useful.

‘Here is a little incident which will explain better than anything else what I mean about the altered status of cultivation. The household accounts of one of Bessie’s acquaintances got into the newspapers one day (I believe she was petitioning her trustees for a larger allowance), and Bessie was reading them aloud at the breakfast table and commenting on them. The monthly bills for food and wines were three hundred and seventy dollars; for reading matter, one dollar and eighty-five cents.

'"What an exorbitant allowance for the things of the mind!" I remarked. And Bessie — actually, Bessie, my sister’s child — said this: “Oh, I don’t know! Magazines seem to cost so much more now they have raised the price from ten to fifteen cents.”

‘ My mother used to speak of women as having, or not having, “the manner of the sheltered life.” No one seems to have it any longer. All life is so exposed, so unsheltered from the unlovely t hings of life! It used to be tacitly understood that everybody was trying to be like — or to seem to be like — the people who were nicest. And there was no mistaking them! But it is n’t necessary to be nice any longer. I don’t know what is necessary except, a large checking account. Blood no longer “tells”; knowledge is no longer power; honesty is no longer the best policy; manners no longer make the man. Well — this is a democracy; let blood go if it is not fit to hold its own; let knowledge go, too, if it must, but do you not think we might contrive to retain a little honesty and a few manners?

‘Does all this sound very critical and ill-natured? Perhaps I am scolding because I have lost my bearings. I frankly confess myself at a loss in this topsy-turvy world. It appears a lavish, good-humored, free-and-easy world, but it lacks quality. It seems to me that there was a pleasantness and dignity about existence when the pace was slower that is entirely lacking now. And I see very few happy people — not nearly so many as formerly. What has become of the old-fashioned Lady? What does her disappearance mean? Is she no longer needed in the world, and shall we never see her like again?’

II

The lady’s correspondent hesitated long before replying. It is such a complicated, and, probably, such a useless thing to express one’s self freely about one’s own times!

‘It was an innocent-looking question your letter put,’ came the reply at last. ‘ “What has become of the oldfashioned Lady?” you wish to know. But any attempt to answer you demands an appalling amount of ink and audacity.

‘What you are really asking is an explanation of the social drift of our day. Now, to criticize competently the social tendency of one’s own time requires superhuman detachment and clarity of mind, an abnormal amount of experience, and much historical knowledge for purposes of comparison. Who can claim all these qualifications? Certainly not I! Such contemporary criticism is bound to be one-sided, imperfect, and to that extent unjust. Nevertheless, any of us may catch a glimpse of vital changes happening around us and manifested in us, and try to set them forth. This is my apologia for telling you brazenly what I think.

’It. is true, as you say, that “ the Lady and the Gentleman are no longer what they were.” All thinking people recognize that social organization and intercourse in this country have undergone a change in the last thirty years as marked in its way as the profound change in business organization and methods during the same time. This change extends to the predominant types in the more favored classes. With their alteration there has come a certain loss of savor in social life. It is only here and there that hospitality has all of its old flavor, and social relations all of their once fine charm. These functions are admittedly in the Lady’s keeping. It is she who has failed us.

’Everybody loved that old-fashioned Lady of whom you speak. And I find that almost everyone past forty has, at the back of his mind, vivid impressions regarding her and the social life of which she was the cent re. One remembers the atmosphere of that day as one remembers the blush-roses and spicy pinks of old gardens. Even yet there are gardens where blush-roses grow, and I know some women not yet old, and a few young girls, whose mere presence serves to-day to reproduce that atmosphere.

‘She was dauntless and sweet, that old-fashioned Lady; witty but tender; as notable a housewife as a hostess; full of gentle concern for others, with a mind ever at leisure for their affairs, and a heart whose sympathy was instantaneous in their service. Shestimulated and she soothed. Fine, complicated, and interesting as the old lace and finely wrought gold she delighted to wear, she was a very precious piece of porcelain. The brilliant, soft, daguerreotype that, has preserved her early likeness for us did not idealize her beyond her just due. Perhaps the intimate secret, of her influence was the impression she gave of one whose heart is fixed, one whom the world can no longer harm.

‘If to this inadequate description any object that such women were then, as now, the rare, the exquisite exceptions, the answer is at hand. Such women were then the ideal, the type. Assuredly the ideal was not always brought to perfection, but young womanhood admired it and worked toward it consistently. Clay in the hands of the potter is no more plastic than girlhood in the grasp of its great admirations.

‘That gentlewoman of yesterday did not know, or do, or have, a thousand things that we all know and do and have to-day, but she was the incarnation of an ideal — a pattern of things sacred — that we are losing, or have lost. She is the Vanishing Lady. What have we done to drive her forth?

‘In considering how this type of beloved woman went, we must take account of how she came.

‘So late as thirty years ago, in the country at large, “ easy circumstances,” whether the margin of ease was wide or narrow, implied and demanded cultivation. It went with them as butter goes with bread. It was the thing expected of people so placed in the world. This was one of the basal ideas of the nineteenth century. The expectation was freely met, as it had been in the generations immediately preceding. There were certain books in the family library, and their contents were a part of the mental equipment of the household, just as, on the less important material side, there was a certain weight of silver on the family tables and a certain quality of linen in the family chests. There were also certain habits of thought and refinements of taste, certain definite ideas in the family consciousness as to what was due to one’s self and ot hers. The cultivation of that day may have been narrow — a little provincial, if you like, even in the cities — but it was effective. Their ideas shaped types of character and manners, both in men and women, whose loss has left social intercourse impoverished.

‘The “easy circumstances” of that period were seldom wealth. Viewed by the standards of to-day, many of those sufficient incomes were small indeed; and yet, as you have noted, their owners achieved more of the finer things, that we suppose money can buy, than wealth often gives to-day.

‘Incomes are larger now, and a very much larger number of people have adequate ones; silver and fine linen are still plentiful, but cultivated people are very much less in evidence than they used to be. Let me say quickly that this is not an assertion that cultivation is ceasing to exist, but only that, broadly speaking, it has lost its ascendancy with the great body of people of a comfortable life. It is no longer one of the things that they seek first. It is, one suspects, becoming one of the compensations of moderate poverty. This, if true, is greatly to be desired, but it does not explain why financial ease and cultivation should cease to be companions. Opponents of our democracy have always claimed that it would result in leveling down, not leveling up, the grades of character and culture. For very pride before such critics, the wellto-do should not justify the taunt that they are becoming the Great U n lettered.

‘Another curious phenomenon is that the same amount of education seems to produce less cultivation than formerly; it certainly produces less of that fine atmosphere for which we have no name, but which we know to be the flower of life.

‘These results have come to pass in spite of the steady spread of education, both higher and lower; the raising of standards in the schools; the vast increase in libraries; the birth and growth of women’s clubs; the valuable device of the traveling library; the incredible development of the magazines, and the indefinite multiplication of all manner of cultural devices.

‘Surely, we have all the conceivable appliances for self-development. Why does not our cultivation cultivate? It almost seems that atmosphere and the gracious quality men complain of missing out of life must be based on something other than the spread of cultural devices.

‘ Many thoughtful people regard this loss as the last and subtlest of our “money troubles.”

‘A dozen years ago I clipped from one of New York’s daily papers a forcible letter addressed to it by an elderly gentleman of Knickerbocker extraction, who hotly arraigned New York in the late nineties as compared to the New York known to him in the sixties. His opinions had no lack of definiteness. Young New York’s insensate handling of its largely increased bank balance was the root of the trouble. He described, as it had seemed to him, New York’s dignified social life before the Civil War, and its gradual deterioration under the subsequent influx of cheap wealth made by furnishing “shoddy” goods to the government, and the other get-rich-quick methods of that era. Running over a list, of names prominent in old Manhattan for a hundred years or more, “These people,” he said in effect, “spent their wealth, large for their day, in comfortable and seemly living. They achieved dignity without flaunting. Expenditure for ostentation was to them a vulgarity impossible to be committed by a right-thinking people. Personal distinction was the basis of their social selections; the result, was a satisfying and stimulating society, free from the vacuities and puerilities which have swamped us since bank accounts became the basis for an exchange of social courtesies.”

‘This is as precise as possible. Knowing human nature, we may be at liberty to speculate whether New York before the war was as absolutely ideal in its conditions as the basis of “personal distinction for social selections’ would have made it; but as regards the more recent “vacuities and puerilities” of its yellow rich, and their lack of interest in the things of the mind, we have a multitude of notable witnesses.

‘“We have been swamped by the imported provincialism of the newlyrich,” mourned one distinguished gentleman in public the other day. “At a dinner where the talkers were worth over thirty millions, the talk was wort h less than thirty cents,”said a wellknown scholar, in a lecture designed to further another nation’s acquaintance with us. “Nobody talks here any longer. Social intercourse consists in exchanging food at intervals too brief to permit of digestion,” writes one suffering from the malaise that follows dining too often and too well.

‘However — whatever it was in the sixties — New York is no longer typically American. It is a city without a country, the chief outpost of Mammon in our land. Where materialism avowedly holds the citadel, why should not our national types be defaced? Why judge the country by New York?

‘ In spite of all the strictures at which these samples only hint, it does not do to be too didactic about anything so much a matter of opinion as atmosphere. The Knickerbocker gentleman, you, and I, may be prejudiced. Let us make the appeal to letters.

‘Imagine some critic, five generations hence, scrutinizing the documents in the case after the familiar manner of Taine, and building up a picture of the different periods of our time from contemporary fiction, always held a good guide in such matters.

‘ “ During the latter part of the nineteenth century, especially the seventies and eighties,” such a critic might conceivably say, “the people of the United States enjoyed a ‘Minor Peace’ comparable to the famous interval of serenity so-styled in the early history of Christianity. The country was resting and recovering from the terrible strain and losses of the Civil War; when it had once achieved a state of adjustment after the inflation following that conflict, it was fairly prosperous. The tremendous series of scientific discoveries and commercial developments which were to follow, and were to enrich the material, and blight the spiritual, life of the land, was only beginning. The coming corrosion of that cheap wealth, vulgarizing manners and demoralizing principles, had not even been suspected. If in religion the old ideas still largely prevailed, their austerity was remarkably softened, while yet their manmaking merits remained. Life was not yet upon a plutocratic basis, and the virtues of a still simpler time endured.

‘“We can obtain,” this critic might continue, “a vivid idea of the difference between this period and the one immediately following it, by studying and comparing two popular fiction-writers of the day. During the seventies and eighties, Mr. William D. Howells was certainly the most widely read novelist of the time. He is everywhere acknowledged in contemporary criticism to be a realist of the greatest distinction and accuracy. His output of fiction diminished during the nineties. This period seems to have been the decade of great social changes, with results which became apparent soon after the beginning of the twentieth century. From 1900 to 1912 we find the position of popular novelist and acknowledged realist held by Mr. David Graham Phillips. The student will find a close comparison of their novels most instructive. Nothing could serve more clearly to bring out the lightning change that fell upon American life and ideals at this time.

‘“In the novels of Mr. Howells, we are dealing with a gentle-mannered people of high intellectual efficiency, of elevated moral standards, of very sensitive consciences, often of wit and charm. The ultimate basis of their social choice appears to be a combination of the finer traits and habits of human nature, somewhat inadequately termed ‘ niceness ’ by the women of the period. While all well-placed people were not equally ‘nice,’ and there is some confusion of standards (impossible for the historian to make out fully after such a lapse of time) between the different brands, or grades, of niceness, there is still no doubt that in looking as a whole at the picture of the time which Mr. Howells presents, we are regarding a period whose social life is formed upon, and dominated by, the tastes, customs, and ideals of people who are cultivated and Christian; people whose aspirations are upward, and whose universe centres outside themselves.

“‘In the novels of Mr. Phillips, we find an appalling change. To believe the state of affairs really actual, and not merely the jaundiced view of a single writer, the student must constantly remind himself that this novelist also was acclaimed a realist. His work sold largely and was widely read. These are facts. Probably there is not a single character in the Phillips novels who would not be pronounced by the Howells characters entirely without the pale. These people eat., drink, work, marry, carry on the world. They do it all as the brutes that perish, asking at each step, ‘What is there in it for me?’ and asking that only. No following of the Gleam for them! The basis of their social preference is money or power. Their morals are imperceptible. High or low, whether they are climbing or are alleged to have arrived, politicians, artists, business men, professional men, working-women or women of leisure, it is all one. They are frankly pursuing the satisfaction of their personal appetites. Some of them do conceive of this process under the formula of ‘seeking self-expression,’ but in general it does not occur to them to explain or justify themselves. They are there — like other natural phenomena — set forth explicitly for the reader’s consideration.

“‘No portraits that Mr. Phillips draws resemble ever so faintly the Lady and Gentleman of former days. These people are certainly not ‘nice.’ The only tolerable personalit ies among them are an old father and mother in The Second Generation. This sensible pair are troubled by the brutalizing effect of their late-won wealth on their own son and daughter, and the father tries to avert the curse he sees his money to be by leaving the bulk of it elsewhere. But these old people, with their regard for manhood and womanhood left over from a more civilized day, are alone in their point of view in these novels.

‘“Undeniably, the characters of these tales convince. They are husky, hardy personalities, active, vital, pushing. One cannot deny that they live — so much as beings can be said to live when they have nothing even remotely resembling a soul. Terrible indeed are these characters —and all the more terrible because they do not recognize that they are anything but average, normal citizens. The author has set them forth as he saw them, without comment, which is, as he doubtless intended, the most merciless way. They go greedily about their business as though poets had never dreamed or prophets warned, as though the gentle Jesus had neither lived nor died. If men were indeed but brutes with intellects, thus and not otherwise would they conduct their lives. These people are, to sum it up, as definitely Pagan as the Howells characters are definitely Christian. But they are far from the simple, joyous, quasi-innocent pagans of pre-Christian days as they have been represented by some writers. Their paganism is of the low and brutal order that might be expected as the result of degeneration from higher standards.

‘“The inference from all this is inevitable. Somewhere there was an awful break in the orderly evolution of American society. Old ideals of manners, of social intercourse, of the ends of civilized living, went down; new conceptions arose, more materialistic, more selfish, and therefore vulgarized. The historian is bound to attribute this to the swift demoralization always following large accessions of cheap wealth.

‘ “ Doubtless the old refinements died hard, and certainly they did not wholly die. Nevertheless, they must have been sore put to it to hold their own, facing the invading horde. Imagine a coterie of Howells characters quietly trying to keep a coterie of Phillips characters in their proper places! The victory would be to the brazen. You might as well ask a dignified family equipage of the eighties, rolling along behind its plump horses, to compete in the matter of speed and noise with a ‘six-sixty’ car, ‘ hitting it up’ at fifty miles an hour, and tooting its horn meanwhile. The mere outward vulgarity of an era when noise and display were so much in evidence must have been enough to make heartsick those inheritors of a different tradition who still cling to quieter ways.

‘“The life of that day must have held a thousand little dramas — shall we call them tragedies? — wrought out in flesh and blood as the old order made its gallant but ever-losing fight against the new, succeeding brilliantly at moments here and there, succumbing over the whole field at last, crushed by the brute force of numbers and the brute weight of dollars. But did the old order make such a fight? Surviving literature holds little record of it save in some stories of the South, — most notably and exquisitely in a book called Lady Baltimore. In these stories the conditions are special and the contrasts sharp. It is impoverished porcelain against enriched clay. This lays almost no stress on the real meaning of the continent-wide struggle which we imagine to have taken place before the finer elements in American life gave way to the coarser; before the inheritors of the high traditions of elder days succumbed to the lures of luxury, indolence, and so-called pleasure. That struggle — if indeed it was ever fought — was broader-based. It was the eternal battle of the spirit, against the flesh.”

’This is a more crushing arraignment than a contemporary would dare to make. And yet there are facts that speak more harshly than this about these “ brutes with intellects.” I read the other day of an accident to a limited train on one of our great railroads. After the overturning of the coaches, men fought their way out over women’s bodies. Some men were seen seizing and thrusting back a woman whose companion had broken a window to help her out, scrambling to safety in her stead. There was no danger of fire, for the coaches were of steel, nor of water, for the accident occurred in dry and level railroad yards. It was merely an instance of baseless, brutal cowardice, such as we have always claimed, and believed, could not happen among decent men of our race. Probably there is not an American woman now living who read of the wreck of La Bourgogne and the fire at the Bazar de la Charité without saying to herself, “Thank Heaven, such cowardice, such brutalities, are impossible to men of our nationality!” That was only fifteen years ago — but what shall we say now ? The decadent French whose brutalities we deplored were, at least, in danger of their lives.

‘To return to our critic’s comparison — even if we who are on the spot can see that Mr. Howells’s realism appealed to one public and Mr. Phillips’s realism to another, the comparison still has justice. The two publics overlap. Also, in the seventies and eighties there was no reading public that would have suffered the Phillips brand of realism. The audience for it arrived simultaneously with the conditions depicted — for people like to read about themselves.

‘When it first began to appear that Mr. Phillips’s powerful unpleasant stories were authentic social symptoms, they worried divers thoughtful readers whom I knew. Could it be that great numbers of other American readers accepted them as faithful presentations? Were these brazen, blatant characters really people whom people knew? One day I found a friend absorbed in one of the books. She assembled in her own person such diverse ingredients and experiences as gave confidence in her breadth of view. In the sixties her grandfather was probably a boon-companion of the querulous Knickerbocker gentleman previously quoted; her mother’s people belonged to the old South; she herself had spent most of her life in the great capital of the Middle West, and her knowledge of it was intimate. She was a shrewd, discriminating observer of people and practices,

‘“What are you reading that for?” I inquired captiously.

'“Why — I like it.”

'"Like it — pray, why?”

‘“It is so true to life. They are so like people, the people one knows.”

'“I don’t know any such horrors!”

Doubtless this was said with that aggressive and inexcusable air of self-righteousness with which we all occasionally refuse to recognize what we dislike.

‘“That, my dear, if true, is because you keep your eyes shut as you go about. I call it an ostrich-like habit. It does n’t tend to any exact knowledge of the world as it is. For it really has changed a little since the daguerreotype days, and it is sheer stupidity not to recognize it.”

‘“But I like the ‘daguerreotype days’ best,” I pleaded weakly.

‘“What—may I ask — has that to do with the question of how things are?” she demanded, round-eyed and serious.

‘ I had no answer. Certainly it is impossible to argue in cold blood that one’s own prepossessions ought to shape the universe, however sure we may all be in our hearts that the universe would be the better for a little conformity to our notions!

‘Admitting that my friend was right, — and a great many people agree with her, — it begins to be clear why the old-fashioned Lady has disappeared, does it not? Can you imagine her in the same world with the Phillips heroines? She was the cherished mental and spiritual product of a society that held, however imperfectly, to Christian ideals; she could only exist in numbers in a society whose aspirations were upward. With the arrival of the modern pagan, she is necessarily superseded. Where her place in the social order is not filled by women of the pagan type, it has been taken by a stronger and more militant Lady, better fitted than she to cope with them.

‘The “easy circumstances” of the greater part of the nineteenth century were the direct product of character and intelligence to a greater extent, probably, than financial ease ever has been before or ever will be again. It was the Golden Age of our national life when, for once in human history, all the elements united to permit a people to prosper without debasement. This was our pride, our boast.

‘At a time when wealth was moderate and depended thus directly upon character, intelligence, and thrift, society was gentle-mannered, idealistic, and cultivated, and the type of woman I have tried to describe was its fine flower. It was impossible for matters to be otherwise. Such qualities were the inevitable outcome of such conditions.

‘In twenty years we have gone back, in this one respect, three hundred. A great share of the new-made wealth now depends, almost as largely as in the days of the robber-barons, on lack of scruple, the abuse of the strong hand, the ability to hold people up. I do not here refer so much to the misuse of corporate power for undue aggrandizement (much as that has affected individual standards of honesty) as to the code of the average business man all over these United States. And, unfortunately, the general lowering of tone has influenced even the learned professions, which were once, and still should be, the strongholds of a better spirit. Ask your family doctor and your family lawyer, if you are so happy as to be ministered to in these capacities by men of the old type, for the truth about the business morale of their respective professions at large to-day. If they are willing to answer you at all, they will tell you stories of greed, graft, and oppression that, somehow, seem more brutal and depressing than similar stories from the world of business — for the business-man takes no vow to deal justly, subscribes to nothing like the immemorial oath of the medical profession.

‘ Where money is made in such ignoble fashion, it cannot be used for beautifying, enriching, and civilizing life; it can only be spent, in ways that are as crude and unlovely as are the methods by which it was made, and the people who have made it. Very broadly speaking, most modern systems of making fortunes work out speedily to the placing of wealth in hands unfit to use it for gracious ends, while the old systems placed it as directly in the hands of the fit. Thus, “the leisure classes have suddenly become the lump and not the leaven,” as one acute observer phrases it.

‘Of course, to affirm this is not to say that the wrong people did not frequently get financial ease by dishonest methods in the old days, or that the right ones do not frequently secure it now by wholly honorable means. But I do mean that in each case the majorities have been reversed. The scales have tipped the other way. And as, under the old system we could feel that the nation as a whole was going uphill, in spite of much that was out of joint, so now, in spite of great betterment. in many details, we are bound to feel that, it must be going down.

‘There is always a large saving remnant. It is not the easiest thing for a youth, brought up in a home where cultivation and Christian ideals are the accepted ways of life, to transform himself off-hand into a highwayman when he is turned out to make a life for himself. It goes against the grain. With all the conspicuous greed of our era, there are countless refusals of begrimed money; countless men who cannot quite stomach many of the modern methods of making fortunes, and who, realizing that character, intelligence, and thrift do not, even yet, connote abject poverty, hold on to them as to their best inheritance. This being the case, it leaves the majority (unfortunately not all) of our would-be highwaymen to come from families where cultivation and Christian ideals were not the accepted rule of life. Hence, the sudden rise to barefaced prosperity of the heavy-bodied, strong-brained pagan as we meet him in Mr. Phillips’s novels or on the street. — the man who says in so many words that he “intends to run over anybody who gets in his way,” and does so.

‘ If these sturdy pagans only knew it (but they are not interested in ideas) they have their philosopher in Nietzsche, and their defenders in some of the younger writers who conceive of a pagan revival as a time of joyous license, when they can do as they will, without paying any of the penalties which they erroneously suppose are exacted by the “cold Christ and tangled Trinities” of the regnant religion, rather than by the nature of things.

‘Conceivably, of course, the LifeSpirit may be in search of the sleek, bull-necked, hard-muscled commercial pirate who is conspicuously the strong man of the hour, as the goal of its long endeavor. But one is unwilling to think so meanly of the Life-Spirit as to believe this. If it were true, the world might as well slip back into chaos at once, for it has been evolved in vain.

‘But doubt of the Life-Spirit is, in sober truth, the Unpardonable Sin. We know that all creation has not travailed together until now to produce the red-faced magnate, the ferreteyed speculator, and the women of their kind.

‘One cannot travel far in these days without being filled with wonder at the vast numbers of these women roaming the continent. They are usually of a wilful fatness, with flesh kept firm by the masseuse; their brows are lowering, and there is the perpetual hint of hardness in their faces; their apparel is exceedingly good, but t heir manners are ungentle, their voices harsh and discontented; there is no light in their eyes, no charm or softness in their presence. They are fitting mates, perhaps, for the able-bodied pagans who are overrunning the earth, but hardly suitable nurses for a generation which must redeem us from materialism, if indeed we are to be so redeemed. Facing them, one wonders if race-suicide is not one of Nature’s merciful devices. How should they or their offspring ever replace our vanishing Lady? Yet they are the natural product of much of our modern wealth, as she was the natural product of the comfortable life of a generation or two ago.

‘ I recall visiting, as a child, one Monday morning, a kitchen where the housewife was assisting the cook about some domestic matter, while the washerwoman was at work in the adjoining laundry. I saw the latter stop rubbing, to peer through the steamy air into the sunny kitchen.

‘ “If I was Lawyer So-an’-so’s wife,” she said, “I wouldn’t be a-messin’ ’round the kitchen Monday morning. I’d have on a white wrapper, an’ set in the front room, an’ rock, an’ rock, an’ rock!"’

‘The incident gripped my infant mind. Was that what washerwomen thought t he mornings were for? I knew the housewives did not think so! For those were still the days of famous housewifery, when the self-respecting woman, of whatever class, looked well to the ways of her husband’s house, and thought it a shame to do otherwise. No morning card-clubs in those days!

‘Looking around an altered world, it sometimes seems to me now that the washerwoman’s ideals have come to the surface and are controlling “society,” while the ideals of the Lady — be she Puritan matron, the muchtried châtelaine of the Southern states, or the descendant of either, who carried their customs into the West — have been relegated to the rubbish-heap.

‘Not that the modern woman is satisfied literally to “rock, an’ rock, an’ rock,” except upon hotel verandas! She is often very busy, — rushed to death, as you have found her,— but she prefers her occupations to have as little relation to the real needs, adornments, and dignities of life as the swaying of the washerwoman’s easy-chair. This is the latest interpretation of the phrase “lady of leisure.” The old interpretation was a different one.

‘One must exempt promptly from these accusations the stronger and more militant Lady already mentioned. She has been developed by the stress of the situation — a daughter of Martha, troubled about many things which men, and other women, and the Zeitgeist, are not attending to properly. It is possible that she, with her deep convictions and her fine earnestness, is destined to play the part in the body social that phagocytes play in the blood. But this is not yet clear.

‘In any case, she is, thus far, outnumbered in the classes having financial ease by the neo-pagan women, and by the very large body of her sisters who are drifting with the current of the modern tendency. The name of these latter is Legion. Some of them are the daughters of our old-fashioned Lady, and by inheritance and training they should have her principle and charm. But they are, frankly, too much hypnotized by other people’s money and other people’s ideals — or lack of them. They want to “ keep up,” to be as idle and extravagant as the next, to compete with an ostentation as insistent as it is tasteless. I once heard a woman put in a nutshell this attitude. She chanced to belong to a city whose exceptionally interesting people had been tried in the furnace, seven times heated, of swiftly alternating lean years and fat. The fat years were at their height.

‘ “ It’s no use talking. You can’t support your social position in this town any longer without plenty of sables and diamonds. . . . I suppose they are n’t the highest qualifications, but I’m not so sure that I mind. I like sables and diamonds.”

‘This has the merit of candor. But if “I’m not so sure that I mind” is to be the Lady’s attitude toward the materialism that is swiftly gaining on us, on her head be the consequences. That these are to be serious and far-reaching, no thinking person can doubt.

‘In defense of the leaning toward diamonds and sables, one must admit that a surplusage of decoration is one of the traditional adjuncts of the Lady — and it does become her! Where the modern woman often makes a grave mistake is in thinking that a useless life, a life of artificial occupations, is the Lady’s traditional life. That belief comes up from the lower levels, as in the case of the washerwoman, or across, from the Latin civilizations. The Germanic, the Anglo-Saxon usage has always been otherwise.

‘The tradition of the high-hearted tribal dames who were our fore-mothers is carried on loyally by our own more militant matrons and maids. They are active at home and abroad. A few of them have been accused of excess of zeal, but their readiest answer — that surely any class must be fairly safe when it is carrying on and adapting a race-usage — is hard to refute.

‘The truth about the leisure of the Lady is this: it was never, in women of our race, a leisure of the hands; it was, preëminently, a leisure of the mind. Aside from her first and most obvious function, the Lady was sheltered, petted and adored that she might have a mind at leisure from itself, and therefore at the service of others. According to her temperament, whether a Martha or a Mary, she performed this service in a more active or more passive fashion. She was the Listener; she inspired, pacified, comforted. She bound up the wounds life made, poured in the oil and wine. Her heart was the home of homeless causes; she cherished ideals as well as individuals. It is a priceless service, and cannot be overpaid. Her loving performance of it was the glory of the type whose loss we are deploring.

‘To be worth her salt in our national life, the Lady must be either Martha or Mary. There is no other honest life for her.

‘Probably the pagan man who is rapidly coming into possession of the earth would like the qualities of our old-fashioned Lady in his domestic life as well as his fathers did. But he can never have those virtues in his womankind. This is one of the natural punishments for being what he is. For all his money cannot buy them, since, to sum up all this argument, they are Christian virtues and will not grow on pagan soil. It is only when men and women associate “in honor preferring one another,” that a really beautiful and well-ordered social life is possible. The moment that even manners become superlatively good, they become Christian. Social intercourse cannot be finer than the people who carry it on. Wealth cannot purchase ideals and the distinction that they alone can give.

‘Doubtless distinction never ran the streets, but our Vanishing Lady, infinitely tender and disciplined, possessed it by virtue of the spirit that was in her. And, by virtue of that same spirit, the cultivation of that day did cultivate, where ours does not; their narrower lives were wider and more gracious than ours of boasted breadth, for the whole of the spiritual kingdom was theirs to explore at will. You cannot do better than to live on the highway that leads everywhere.

‘In that day it was enough to say of people or practices that they were not Christian or well-bred, but these adjectives no longer carry finality. To convince the growing pagan spirit of to-day of its own unfitness, the argument must be broader, more cosmic. Shall we ask, then, if the stars in their courses fight for or against our oldfashioned Lady?

‘Quite apart from any religious prepossessions, this world has been demonstrated to be the world of the Spirit. That is to say, from the beginning of time, the tendency of evolution has been steadily toward the creation of the finer, the more complicated type. From amoeba to Man is almost an infinite journey, but painstaking nature made it, spending endless millions of years and lives, experimenting, adapting, struggling

to perfect that vision commanded, one may well believe, from the Beginning.

‘The journey from pre-historic man to the Christian gentleman is almost as marvelous a pilgrimage, if shorter. But what is Man as finally achieved but a vehicle, a little less clumsy than other forms of flesh, for the perception and expression of spirit? How clumsy a vehicle still! Yet every candid person must admit from experience that the great thing in our life is this: somewhere in the deeps of being, in some way we do not understand, flesh and spirit are knotted fast together. We actually do come into this world with the whisper in our ear of a Voice from the dark commanding “ valor and an unnatural virtue.”

‘Coming down to the pages of recorded human experience, the Spirit has written large on all of them,—

‘The pendulum of history swings a long arc from the brutality of barbarism to the brutality of decadence. For the former condition there is hope; for the latter, none. The ancient civilizations all tell one story. With increase of wealth comes materialism, decadence of morals and manners, loss of the Spirit. Then, quickly, that nation rots, dies, and is buried; the stage is cleared, the scene set for a new experiment. The Spirit seeks another vehicle, one fitter and more loyal, to carry on the sacred fire.

‘History and the sciences have joined hands to give us this long perspective. To no generation of earth has such a vast view of the cosmic plan been available before. We actually see something of t he drift of the æons, the great current of the Spirit’s intent. By grace of the knowledge we have fought for, it is given to us, first of all the sons of men, to read the mind of God.

‘If, then, we allow ourselves to descend int o the hell of a voluntary materialism, our damnation is deeper and swifter than that of Greece or Rome or Babylon. For we know what we do.

‘Yet in the face of our vast increase in wealth and our distressing increase in materialism, who can say that the time of our own last testing is not at; hand? It is a curious thought, and a stirring, that even this may be the illuminated, the critical moment in our development, upon which the spot-light of history will finally be turned.

‘ “ In the early years of the twentieth century,” some austere future historian may write, when we and ours have vanished utterly, “the fate of the American people hung in the balance. Only a little way behind them lay the honorable days when character, intelligence, and thrift worked out for individual ease and a refined society. Only fifty years earlier they had waged for an idea one of the fiercest wars ever fought. Possibly that war killed so many of the best youths of the nation as to leave the next generation spiritually impoverished by the loss of their offspring. And it is true that in the meantime cheap wealth had assailed them with its demoralizations, and the nations of Europe had flooded them with alien peoples. But, in judging the failure of America, it must be borne in mind always that theirs was a nation founded upon an ideal, by men who were determined to plant in the wilderness a Commonwealth of God.

‘“No nation ever had such a foundation laid for it, such a virgin continent given into its hands for an inheritance. It was the unequalled opportunity, never offered to the human race before, impossible to repeat on this globe. Their chance was matchless, wonderful.

‘“Only one hundred and twentyfive years after they achieved national unity, we find them rotting, though not ripe. They were destroying with inconceivable rapidity both their physical and their moral inheritance. They wasted their forests, they gutted their mines; their municipalities were frankly corrupt, their governing bodies less openly so; even their judiciary was under suspicion.

“‘All this was the work of cupidity. Lust of wealth had become a mania, an obsession. Greed was epidemic, virulent. They were at death-grips with materialism.

“‘And yet they were so near those simpler, happier days of their earlier national life that it seemed to middleaged men and women that they had but to put out their hands to touch them! Surely, somewhere, there must have been enough of the old spirit left to save them!

‘“Contemporary accounts show that many men of the nation were mightily aroused, and that many of their women fought with them. They directed their efforts, however, against the graft and corruption that were the symptoms of encroaching materialism. Against the disease itself there was no concerted attack. There seems, even, to have been no clear general notion of its relation to their national disorder.

‘“The women of their leisure classes had in their very grasp a marvelous opportunity. What an achievement, to maintain the Puritan standard of morals and simplicity, the Cavalier’s standard of courtesy, and to add to this the intellectual refinements of the older civilizations! As a matter of fact, this composite ideal was developing in the mid-Victorian period. But, whatever it was that diverted them from that fine ambition, certain it is that in the early part of the twentieth century, great numbers of their women of comfortable lives were incapable even of grasping such a conception. Their mothers had chosen the better part, but they are described as inordinately idle and extravagant, evading domestic duties, crying, ‘Give, give,’ like the daughters of the horse-leech. They were untrue to those standards of social honor which it had hit herto been considered the privilege of the gentlynurtured women of their nation to maintain. They made small effort to preserve the old ideals.

“‘This is called a material world, yet it takes only fifteen or twenty years for an idea that is widely accepted to alter the world’s face. This is a Janusfaced fact. It will work as well for damnation as for salvation. It worked steadily against the American people after the social changes of the nineties; it might have worked for them with equal facility, had all their women willed it so.

‘“From all accounts, their influence with their men was so great that, single-handed, they might have given battle to decadence and won. In the two great struggles which the nation had previously endured, the women had borne their honorable, arduous part. Had the women of the more favored classes been of one mind in recognizing at this time that the land was again in danger, was, actually, in its deathstruggle with materialism; had they proudly refused, as they might have done, to countenance the extravagance, ostentation, corruption, and greed, which were the symptoms of the nation’s swift decay, the men fighting for honesty, for the success of the Great Experiment in democracy, might have won their struggle. The better causes might have prevailed. America’s account with the Spirit, opened in 1620 and closed with the closing years of the twentieth century, might have shown a different balance. But — they chose otherwise. And so to another race was given the land of their inheritance, and of them it was finally written, 'They know not the things that belong to their peace.'"'