第41章 ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT(3)

Why women suffer these wrongs--why they do not insist in having their clothes made small enough for them I cannot conceive.It can hardly be that they are disinclined to trouble themselves about matters of mere dress, for dress is the one subject that they really do think about.It is the only topic they ever get thoroughly interested in, and they talk about it all day long.If you see two women together, you may bet your bottom dollar they are discussing their own or their friends' clothes.You notice a couple of child-like beings conversing by a window, and you wonder what sweet, helpful words are falling from their sainted lips.So you move nearer andthen you hear one say:

"So I took in the waist-band and let out a seam, and it fits beautifully now.""Well," says the other, "I shall wear my plum-colored body to the Jones', with a yellow plastron; and they've got some lovely gloves at Puttick's, only one and eleven pence."I went for a drive through a part of Derbyshire once with a couple of ladies.It was a beautiful bit of country, and they enjoyed themselves immensely.They talked dressmaking the whole time.

"Pretty view, that," I would say, waving my umbrella round."Look at those blue distant hills! That little white speck, nestling in the woods, is Chatsworth, and over there--""Yes, very pretty indeed," one would reply."Well, why not get a yard of sarsenet?""What, and leave the skirt exactly as it is?" "Certainly.What place d'ye call this?"Then I would draw their attention to the fresh beauties that kept sweeping into view, and they would glance round and say "charming," "sweetly pretty," and immediately go off into raptures over each other's pocket-handkerchiefs, and mourn with one another over the decadence of cambric frilling.

I believe if two women were cast together upon a desert island, they would spend each day arguing the respective merits of sea-shells and birds' eggs considered as trimmings, and would have a new fashion in fig- leaves every month.

Very young men think a good deal about clothes, but they don't talk about them to each other.They would not find much encouragement.A fop is not a favorite with his own sex.Indeed, he gets a good deal more abuse from them than is necessary.His is a harmless failing and it soon wears out.Besides, a man who has no foppery at twenty will be a slatternly, dirty-collar, unbrushed-coat man at forty.A little foppishness in a young man is good; it is human.I like to see a young cock ruffle his feathers, stretch his neck, and crow as if the whole world belonged to him.I don't like a modest, retiring man.Nobody does--not really, howevermuch they may prate about modest worth and other things they do not understand.

A meek deportment is a great mistake in the world.Uriah Heap's father was a very poor judge of human nature, or he would not have told his son, as he did, that people liked humbleness.There is nothing annoys them more, as a rule.Rows are half the fun of life, and you can't have rows with humble, meek-answering individuals.They turn away our wrath, and that is just what we do not want.We want to let it out.We have worked ourselves up into a state of exhilarating fury, and then just as we are anticipating the enjoyment of a vigorous set-to, they spoil all our plans with their exasperating humility.

Xantippe's life must have been one long misery, tied to that calmly irritating man, Socrates.Fancy a married woman doomed to live on from day to day without one single quarrel with her husband! A man ought to humor his wife in these things.

Heaven knows their lives are dull enough, poor girls.They have none of the enjoyments we have.They go to no political meetings; they may not even belong to the local amateur parliament; they are excluded from smoking-carriages on the Metropolitan Railway, and they never see a comic paper--or if they do, they do not know it is comic: nobody tells them.

Surely, with existence such a dreary blank for them as this, we might provide a little row for their amusement now and then, even if we do not feel inclined for it ourselves.A really sensible man does so and is loved accordingly, for it is little acts of kindness such as this that go straight to a woman's heart.It is such like proofs of loving self-sacrifice that make her tell her female friends what a good husband he was--after he is dead.

Yes, poor Xantippe must have had a hard time of it.The bucket episode was particularly sad for her.Poor woman! she did think she would rouse him up a bit with that.She had taken the trouble to fill the bucket, perhaps been a long way to get specially dirty water.And she waited for him.And then to be met in such a way, after all! Most likely she sat down and had a good cry afterward.It must have seemed all so hopeless to the poor child; and for all we know she had no mother to whom she could goand abuse him.

What was it to her that her husband was a great philosopher? Great philosophy don't count in married life.

There was a very good little boy once who wanted to go to sea.And the captain asked him what he could do.He said he could do the multiplication-table backward and paste sea-weed in a book; that he knew how many times the word "begat" occurred in the Old Testament; and could recite "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" and Wordsworth's "We Are Seven.""Werry good--werry good, indeed," said the man of the sea, "and ken ye kerry coals?"It is just the same when you want to marry.Great ability is not required so much as little usefulness.Brains are at a discount in the married state.There is no demand for them, no appreciation even.Our wives sum us up according to a standard of their own, in which brilliancy of intellect obtains no marks.Your lady and mistress is not at all impressed by your cleverness and talent, my dear reader--not in the slightest.Give her a man who can do an errand neatly, without attempting to use his own judgment over it or any nonsense of that kind; and who can be trusted to hold a child the right way up, and not make himself objectionable whenever there is lukewarm mutton for dinner.That is the sort of a husband a sensible woman likes; not one of your scientific or literary nuisances, who go upsetting the whole house and putting everybody out with their foolishness.