IIWITH A LEFT-OVER GIRL
She had said that she did not care to play that afternoon, and the young man went away with a disappointed look. There had been one or two young men near her most of the time that day. Now she was alone. She sat in a shaded part of the hotel veranda. In her lap was an open book, face down. As I drew near I saw that the book was covered with a fragment of unlettered paper, a circumstance which left to merely ocular dexterity no chance of knowing what she was reading.
“My dear,” I said in a sort of paternal way, designed to palliate the effect of an intrusion, “for a moment I was tempted to think that you preferred a book to a man; but since you are not ardently reading I am giving myself so much ofthe benefit of the doubt as to take this chair beside you, and to remark that you cannot expect to escape the common danger of being talked to even if you do not care to play.”
“You are very welcome. Talking is a game, too, isn’t it? We are supposed always to be ready to play that.”
“Nevertheless, perhaps I should ask you first, as the young man did just now about the other game, whether you really are willing. You might choose to go on with the book, and I could study the scenery.”
“This game has begun already. As for the book, I came to a stupid place,—a lot of description.”
“You know,” I said, “a man finds a certain justification for talking to a woman in the fact recently exploited by science, that woman does not talk to herself. While they still urge that it is not good for man to be alone, man seems to have invented one means of getting on alone that is denied to women; for if he can talk to himself he has acquired a singularly useful safety valve.”
“I am sure it is very nice of you, when you could talk to yourself, to waste words on me. I hope there isn’t anything in this new theory that may prove that manmusttalk. It would be upsetting, you know. Perhaps it isn’t true that women never talk to themselves. I don’t believe that I ever talk to myself, but I don’t have to. There is always somebody about. And I really never have anything left to say to myself.”
“I think I should prefer to have you take me for granted,” I said. “It would spoil your effect if you were either grateful or resentful. After all, these scientific generalizations are distressingly misleading. Take that recent statement that baldness is a safeguard against insanity. Some of the hair-restorer advertisements do not seem to indicate a faith in the entire sanity of the bald. Yet it is a benevolent theory. No one would voluntarily lose his hair for the certainty of not losing his reason, but the bald may derive some real solace from the invention. Doubtless many of life’s most comforting assurances have no better foundation.”
“Are you in that mood?”
“I am rebuked for my platitude.”
“In the talk game platitudes are very safe, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps they are; and in most games simply being safe naturally occupies much of the time. Yet in the talk game it can’t be fair to catch one’s breath with a platitude too often—not unless one wishes to be thrown back upon solitaire.”
“Solitaire is an excellent game. I think it is much underrated.”
“It is very safe, too.”
“Yes, and it is unquarrelsome. It never breaks friendships.”
“I can’t imagine you quarrelling in a game,” I ventured to say.
“Perhaps that is because I know with whom to play,—and which games to keep out of.”
“Do you know that it would be a great relief, if not a real comfort, to a man in certain circumstances if he could know just when a woman was out of the game? His perplexity in the matter of the greatest game of all, when he does not know whether she really is playing or only is loitering about with the players, sometimes is one of the most distressing spectacles in life.”
“It seems to me,” said the Left-Over Girl, with a little shrug, “that he generally should be able totell whether she is playing or not. As for knowing whether she ever is going to play any more, that seems to me like more knowledge than he is entitled to.”
“Possibly; but as I have suggested, it would save much time and many doubts, if nothing more,—reduce the sum of popular skepticism. And even the spectator, who is not presumed to be in the way of playing, might have a simple human curiosity in the matter.”
“Oh, the spectator always has curiosity, and the spectator is an element to be counted, too; there are so many of them, and they influence the players in one way or another so much. But I don’t think the spectators have any more right than the players to know when any one in particular is out of the game for good.”
“As for that, I much doubt whether any one is to be counted as out of the game for good. I heard yesterday of a Miss Nottingby who has just been married at the age of eighty-three. One never can tell. But that is not the point. It is the attitude of mind that counts. That a woman should think that she is out of the game, or have decided definitely that she will not play any more, must be of great importance even when the fact is not known, as we must suppose generally happens. My point is that if the facts were more generally known various beneficent results might accrue.”
“To whom?”
“To all of us, including the seceders. The uncertainty breeds cynicism. Of course I know that there is something piquing about the mystery surrounding the motives of the unmarried, especially the motives of the unmarried woman. But although this is so entertaining in itself, although the new old maid is the most cheerful, the most useful, and the most fascinating sphinx of the century, I feel at times as if there may be something disintegrating in her complacence and in the complacence of society regarding her.”
“How good it is of you to be so altruistically grieved!”
“Why don’t you ask me why I am saying this to you?”
“Because I know, and because it is so much more amusing to have you say it unassisted.”
“Now, do you know that I should have expected to find you superior to a proclivity so purely feminine as that. To make him say things unassisted! From the dawn of time woman has delighted to do that.”
There was a haze of thought in her eyes. “I dare say you never have stopped to think that when he is assisted he says so much more than he means.”
“I thought you were going to say, ‘than he ought to.’”
“The greater includes the less. When he says a little that he doesn’t mean he says a great deal more than he ought to.”
“Perhaps he always will say much that he shouldn’t, anyway. But admitting that you have the right to mystify him, and then not to help him, does it seem to you precisely fair that girls who neither go into the marrying game, nor stay out of it, should—”
“Flirt as much as they do—I want to save you the trouble of finding an inoffensive phrase.”
“Perhaps I wasn’t going to be inoffensive. And I might not have chosen the word ‘flirt.’ Flirt doesn’t exactly express the idea. I shouldn’t wishto seem as if I were hunting about for a new title for an old crime,—”
“Crime? You will be quite solemn in a moment. Did you come over here to scold me?”
“I thought this was a talk game. A talk game couldn’t have a motive, could it?”
“Why, yes. It is like a Wagnerian composition. We might have encountered the Didactic Motive.”
“Now you are scolding me. I insist that I am merely the Interested Spectator. Maybe I am a sort of Walking Gentleman in the cast, who, with every wish not to be impertinent, ventures a timid and respectful word with the leading lady in the wings.”
“Should you think the Walking Gentleman had a right to quarrel with the leading lady as to her method of reading the lines?”
“No; but surely he might ask her, humbly, and in a spirit of honest inquiry, what she thought the author meant and whether, to her, the play seemed consistent. Even the Walking Gentleman must be presumed to have certain human impulses. Perhaps he can’t even find out who is the leading lady. Perhaps the girl who seems designed by nature to be the heroine, the girl who, if he were the Hero and not the Walking Gentleman, would make his duty clear, betrays a singular indifference to the Hero, the Hero’s understudy, and all the rest of them.”
“Then you have come over here with a view to classifying me?”
“Suppose I had so definite a hope?”
“I might help you.”
“What are you, please?”
“I am the Left-Over Girl.”
“I don’t wish to be ungracious, but that does not help me much. Who or what has left you over?”
“Circumstances. In the course of the great readjustment I am left out, lost in the shuffle, if you like.” This idea seemed to please her. “Marriage is like any other game, isn’t it? He calls her bluff—”
“Don’t!” I protested. “These card game allusions perplex me as much as the paradox which I have encountered in my travels this year, that poker is popular in New England and dominoes in Texas.”
“But somebody told me that they play a very wicked kind of dominoes in Texas, and I know that they play a very moral kind of poker in New England.”
“I am afraid you play poker.”
“Like Mistress Muslin, I love cards. And youknow there are some people who never have good hands. Doesn’t that prove that the word ‘chance’ has a deep and dark meaning? There is fate behind chance. I never had a good hand but once.”
“In which game?”
“Oh, in the card game. And I didn’t win, for the old reason—my partner was so stupid. I could have withered him. But he was an unwitherable man.”
“I wish that you would tell me something more about this left-over situation. Not that I think you can know very much about it yet. You cannot have been left over very long, and asking you about your left-overness may be almost as premature as intercepting the newly arrived European traveller in New York Bay and asking him how he likes America.”
“I suppose you wish to ask me how it feels to be left over.”
“No, I haven’t got so far as that. As you have taken part, as it were, in the circumstances which have left you over, I should like to find out if I could, that is to say, if you felt that you could tell me, which qualities in you tended to bring about this result. I feel quite certain that you are not a born old maid. The born old maid is one of nature’s whimsicalities that are not hard to read. Even when she is married, one may easily recognize her. What interests me is the subtle differentiation in those among the unmarried who neverwill be old maids, which has produced their left-overness. For the life of me I can’t see why you should be left over, either subjectively or objectively. Is it a gnawing prejudice, or a sense of humor, that has made you leave yourself over?”
“Might not those things characterize an old maid?”
“They might, but an old maid would be an old maid without regard to the possession of any such particular qualities. The old maid instinct is another matter. We are talking now about this different and evolved modern tendency.”
“Suppose I were to say that marriage simply is not in my line. What should you say that that indicated? Might not an old maid say that?”
“She might say it and she does say it, which may indicate how indefinite it is. In the interest of social science I really should like to know what you think you mean by that. Of course questions upon so serious a matter necessarily seem a trifle brutal.”
“Don’t apologize, Mr. Scientist. I suspect that the trouble with me is that I can’t get up a personal interest in marriage. I have no prejudice against it as an institution, or as a—state of mind. I am not even single because I am cautious. No one has preached to me the philosophy of disenchantment. I know married people who are happy, and single people who are unhappy. I have seen the tall girl and the short man, and the tall man and the short girl, illustrate the splendid paradoxesof pairing. I believe that marriage is just as good and just as bad as the people who illustrate it. But I haven’t been able to get up any personal interest in it, any more than I have been able to get up a personal interest in the law or medicine. After all, marriage is a career. I don’t hate the Church because I do not feel called to preach. Yet I don’t feel that I have the least instinctive aversion to marriage. Do you suppose that if I were a born old maid I should be conscious of the instinctive removal?”
“Probably not. Do you hear that music in the hotel parlor that has supplied a plaintive accompaniment to our talk?”
“That is Miss—hush! If ever there was an old maid born—”
“Yes, and that woman has dreamed of marriage from her girlhood. Wasn’t it Charles Lamb who said with regard to music that he was sentimentally disposed to harmony but applicably was incapable of a tune? Poetry and the old maid instinct have battled in that woman for forty years. But we are slippingfrom science into gossip. Shouldn’t she answer your question?”
“I don’t know. Who can say that she isn’t conscious of the instinct? Lamb knew that he couldn’t actually make a tune. It was Lamb, wasn’t it, who tried all his life to like Scotsmen? And when he gave up at the end he was so sweet about it. He couldn’t like them, but he didn’t have a bit of additional resentment because he had failed. Some people hate—with interest from the date of prejudice. Now I have been trying for—quite a few years to like marriage,—personally, you know,—and if I fail I don’t expect to place any interest charges against the institution.”
“And on the other hand, if you succeed, you mustn’t expect marriage to pay you too heavily on the investment.”
“I’m afraid I should be more likely to do that than the other. I suppose that shows that I am not a philosopher. If I ever marry—but howridiculous that sounds! You would think I was talking about—any other career.”
“Oh, if I were selling stock in matrimony, I should consider you quite a hopeful case. But I’ll wager that many another man has thought the same thing. And naturally you have not been seriously conscious of the phases of yourself that have made you seem like a hopeful case to them. I was reading the other day in a new Franklin biography an advertisement written by Franklin and appearing in his paper. It concerned certain missing books of his, and was headed: ‘Lent and Forgot to Whom,’ Ah! my dear, it is so with many of you women: you lend and forget to whom. But the men—”
“What a dreadfully unfortunate analogy! If they keep that which does not belong to them, am I to blame? And how can a girl try to like matrimony without trying to like men? I ought not to be feminine enough to remind you that men have been known to ‘forget to whom.’ Do you see that young fellow coming up the path with the girl in white duck? You see what an adroit, hovering style he has? I know just the sort of thing he is saying to that white duckling. He is one of the men who forget to whom. He is a Cynic-Maker.”
We watched them silently as they sauntered up the path.
“Yes,” I said, “that is the way the great tangle begins. A nice girl meets your Cynic-Maker, finds that he forgets to whom, from which she concludesthat all men are a mockery. Then some honest young fellow meets her, revolts at her crude, newly fledged cynicism, which an older or a less honest man might have penetrated in a moment, decides that all women are depraved, and there you are with all the elements of a social tragedy. We may say that the arch-mischief-maker is the man who creates the cynic; yet we should, perhaps, inquire whether any new conditions are producing him.”
“He is as old as lying,” she said quietly, her eyes following him up the steps.
“The one comfort,” I added, “is that he probably does not succeed in making cynics so easily as in an earlier state of society.”
“You mean that girls are more skeptical?”
“I mean that girls have more freedom, more experience, more information, more opportunities for comparison, and that the Cynic-Maker, to succeed, has to be vastly cleverer than he used to be.”
“I believe I shall join you in that optimism, though I am inclined to think that by an operation of natural selection he is vastly cleverer than he used to be.”
The Cynic-Maker sat down beside the white duckling at the other end of the veranda.
“Witness,” I said, “the grotesque appositions of life: The Cynic-Maker and the Victim at one end of the stage, and the Spectator with the Left-Over Girl at the Other. Surely we havehere some very important elements of a social allegory.”
“And in spite of everything,” mused the Left-Over Girl, “I was going to say just now that I thought marriage was more popular than ever.”
“What makes you think that—I mean in view of the statistics, in view of the census of the unmarried?”
“You must not insist upon participation only as indicating popularity. Take the instance of golf, which few people actually play, but which isthegame all the same. I mean that in proportion to the number who do not marry there is less affirmative objection to marriage than in the past.”
“I wish I knew how you make that out. But I am going to take this much from it, and you will correct me if I am wrong: Women are less likely to marry than formerly; but they are also less certain not to marry.”
“Would it cheer you any to believe that?”
“I do not insist upon being cheered. But I should like to know. I am weak enough to want to be confirmed in a belief which I have tried to formulate. You can see that matrimony might get some comfort out of it just as golf does. It might enjoy the flattery of being the greatest game even if every one doesn’t choose to play, even if certain charming women do choose to cover their emotions with a veil of sophistry as they cover their books with brown paper.”
“And thou, Brutus!—after I had lifted the veil!I am very magnanimous. I play a talk game with you, and let you ask me impossible questions, label myself for you, uncover my dearest theories, deal mercifully with your syllogizing, and now I agree to your formula,—yes, and I take off my brown paper. What more could mortal woman do?”
“Nothing more,” I said, staring at the letteringon the book, “nothing more, except tell me why on earth you are reading ‘Emma’?”
She gave a little chuckle and shook her head. “That,” she said, “is the one thing you have asked that I can not answer.”