Part 2

“I tell you,” he said, “what a man wants in a wife more than anything else is a cheerful companion. Goodness? Bah! All women, at least the kind a man marries, are good. Economy? A man likes to spend money on his wife. Amiability? Who wants a simpering doll always about? Domesticity? Stuff and nonsense. A man’s stomach isn’t the most important part of him. Besides there is a good restaurant on every corner, if he is bound to gorge himself on food.

“I tell you what a man wants is cheerfulness in his wife. He wants to come home at night to somebody who will meet him with a smile, somebody who has got a lot of bright little things to tell him, and who can make him laugh, somebody who is willing to put on her prettiest dress and go out with him if he wants to go to any place of amusement.

“He doesn’t want to come home to a woman who is sodden with tears, or who is running over with the accumulated worries of the day that she dumps on him, who is full of her own and other people’s hard luck stories, and who looks like a chapter of the Lamentations of Jeremiah.”

Of course, whether a wife is melancholy or not does not, from an ethical standpoint, alter her husband’s duty to her. He should be strong enough to love and cherish her no matter how lacrimose she is; but the martyr’s crown is a piece of headgear that is distinctly unfashionable at the present time, and most men duck wearing it. Wherefore, it behooves the Amalgamated Order of Doleful Wives to cheer up, and try to be more lively companions to their husbands if they don’t want those gentlemen to stray off in search of ladies with sunnier dispositions.

As a matter of fact, men are, emotionally, very primitive creatures with a few simple domestic wants. They desire to be petted, and jollied, and looked up to by their wives, and then they want to be treated as good fellows. They want their wives to be chums with them, and not reforming institutions, or lecture bureaus.

The average man simply pines for cheerful comradeship from his wife. He wants her to enjoy the things that he does, to like the people he likes, to amuse herself with the things that divert him. He wants to hear her laugh, to see her eyes sparkle, and for her to treat him as on a par with herself, as if they were joyous fellow sinners together, instead of her being a living reproof to him as a poor low-browed creature, with musical-comedy tastes that make her shudder.

Yet do you ever notice the ordinary married couple out together? It is one of the most piteous sights on earth. The man is spending his money trying to give his wife a good time, and she meets his noble efforts with the rasping qualities of a crosscut saw. That is what gives eternal pungency to the old Weber and Fields joke about the man who, when asked if he was going to take his wife with him on a trip to Paris, replied: “No, I am going on a pleasure excursion.”

Of course whether it is any more a woman’s place to get along with her husband than it is his to get along with her is another fight, which I am not trying to referee here. So also is the question of how a wife likes to be treated. What I have tried to show is how a husband would like his wife to pull the wool over his eyes and put on the velvet glove before she tries to manage him—because men really enjoy being bamboozled by women who turn out a nice artistic job. What they object to is not being henpecked, but the raw way in which their wives do it.

II

CHARM

Over and over again girls ask me these questions: What is charm? What is the secret of the attraction that some women have for men?

What is the “come-hither” look in the eye that some women have that makes every man who beholds it get up and follow them?

Why do some girls always have hosts of beaux flocking about them, while other girls just as good-looking, just as clever, just as good dancers, just as anxious to please, never have a date or a single sweetheart to bless themselves with?

And to all of these questions I have to answer, sadly and disconsolately, that I do not know. I have to give up the conundrum, which is perhaps the riddle that the Sphinx, who is partly a woman, has brooded over through the centuries in her desert solitude, without ever being able to solve it.

In Barrie’s delightful play, “What Every Woman Knows,” Maggie’s brothers, discussing her with the brutal frankness with which brothers approach the subject of a sister, agreed that she wasn’t young, nor brilliant, and that she was homely, yet all the men were after her. Finally one of the brothers said: “But she’s got that damned charm.” And that was that.

When a woman has that damned charm she can snap her fingers in the face of flappers and living pictures, and marry as early and as often as she pleases as is witnessed by the many fat, pie-faced women we all know who have had two, and three, or more, husbands apiece, and who still have a waiting list in case anything untoward and fatal should happen to the gentlemen to whom they are at present united in the holy bonds of matrimony.

But what is this charm, what is this rabbit’s foot that some lucky women carry, and others do not? To say that it is personality is to attempt to explain one mystery by another mystery, for we do not know in what personal magnetism consists, or by what power one individual draws us, while another repulses us.

We know that it isn’t beauty, because the best lookers among girls are seldom the most popular, and men who profess to worship beauty are generally content to adore it from a safe distance, and show no disposition to marry it. It is notorious that beauties seldom make good matches. Nor does charm consist of intelligence. Being a highbrow booms no woman’s stock, socially or matrimonially, while a witty woman cuts her throat with her own tongue.

To be a spellbinder is for a girl’s fairy godmother to have wished a curse instead of a blessing upon her, for no woman is more anathema to men than the human phonograph. Even dancing, chief of accomplishments in these jazzy days when it is of more profit for a woman to have her brains in her heels than in her head, is but a passing attraction, while amiability and a sweet nature, woman’s traditional one best bet, are like a sticking plaster, potent to hold a man after marriage, but of small value in luring him into it.

Undoubtedly, charm in its perfection is a gift of the gods, but happily, in these days, when nature proves a cruel stepmother who is so mean and stingy that she does not give us all that is coming to us, we have learned to circumvent the lady. No woman need be as ugly as God made her, nor as unattractive as she was born. Drug-store complexions can put the inherited ones to the blush, and any girl who is willing to take the trouble can acquire a line of lures and graces that will make any bona fide siren tremble for her job. To the girl, then, who wishes to acquire charm, and who especially wishes to attract men, I would say, first, stress your femininity.

I don’t mean be namby-pamby and weepy and dish-raggy, without any backbone. That type of woman has gone out of fashion as completely as bustles and hoopskirts. No man now would be bored with the sort of perfect lady his grandmother was. But the eternal feminine remains still the eternal attraction for men, and the more womanly a woman is, the gentler, the tenderer, the sweeter, the more she appeals to men. If you will notice when a man speaks of the woman he loves, he invariably calls her “little” no matter if she is six feet high and weighs 200 pounds. What he means is that she gives him the reaction of depending upon him, of looking up to him, and that in some subtle way she flatters his vanity by giving him the sense of masculine superiority.

You never see an aggressive, double-fisted woman, who fights her way as a man does, get anywhere. And in his soul every man adores frills and furbelows, and likes to see women dolled up. That is why girls make such a terrible mistake when they ape mannish ways, and wear mannish clothes. When a girl puts on knickerbockers she throws her trump card into the discard.

To the girl who wishes to acquire charm I would also whisper this secret: Make of yourself a mirror in which other people look upon themselves. Especially let men see a flattering reflection of themselves in your eyes. Can your own personal vanity. Listen with bated breath while other people tell you of their exploits, but never mention your own. Enthuse over their cars, their dogs. Marvel at their adventures. Sympathize with their disappointments. Give the glad hand to their successes, and you will be universally regarded as a woman of perfect taste, wonderful insight, profound judgment, a brilliant talker and a companion of whom one could never weary. It is the tireless listeners, and not the endless talkers, whom men take out to dinner.

To the girl who wishes to develop charm I would likewise earnestly recommend an intensive course of self-analysis. I would say to her: “Study yourself. Find out what you can wear and what you cannot wear. Find out the things that you can do and get away with, and the things that you cannot do without making yourself appear either a dumbbell or a figure of fun. Then, having ascertained what are your best points, turn the spotlight on them. Emphasize them until you make everybody sit up and take notice, so that even casual acquaintances will remember you as the girl who always wears pink, or the girl who always dresses in black, or the girl with the Mona Lisa smile, or the girl who is so jolly and such a cut-up, or the girl who listens to you with such an absorbed expression on her face that you could go on talking to her forever. I would urge girls to try to be themselves, plus, as they say in business, and to raise whatever charms of body, or mind, or heart, they have to its _n_th power. That is the best way to acquire personality, the “something different” about us that sets us apart from every other human being, instead of our being just one of the herd.

Don’t be a copycat. Don’t understudy the mannerisms of another girl just because she happens to be popular. Imitation airs and graces have about as much sparkle to them as imitation diamonds. Besides, you never can make a go of it. You can’t put on another woman’s characteristics any more than you can her clothes, and make them seem as if they were your own birthday suit. They are always a grotesque misfit. Charm has to be made to order and cut to the measurement of the individual. That is why one girl may do bold, outrageous things and everybody only shrugs his shoulders and laughs at her, while another girl is sent to Coventry for not doing half so much. That is why some women always have a masculine shoulder offered for them to weep upon, while men tell other women not to be fools whenever they shed a tear.

So the trick is for the girl to find out what her own class is and qualify for the blue ribbon in that instead of trying to force her way into a bunch of prize winners where she doesn’t belong and where she will be thrown out by the judges. Yet many girls make the mistake of doing this very thing. A quiet, serious-minded, mouse-like little girl observes that some gay and dashing girl, who has quicksilver in her veins and over whose lips laughter bubbles as spontaneously as a mountain spring, is much admired and sought after and is the life of the party wherever she goes.

“Aha! Vivacity is what makes a girl popular,” says the demure one to herself. “I will also be sprightly, and merry, and make a hit.”

So she tries to imitate the high spirits of the gay girl, but she can’t do it. Her home-made vivacity is as flat as home-brew beer beside imported champagne. Instead of being bright, she is loud. Instead of laughing, she giggles. Instead of being sprightly, she jumps around like a monkey on a stick. She is so afraid she won’t talk enough that she chatters incessantly, and instead of amusing people she bores them to death.

Yet the very girl who is such a failure as a live wire could have charmed every one if only she had given a master performance of girlish sweetness, and gentleness, and quietness. She could have been a great success if she had remained the shrinking violet that nature made her, but she was a rank failure as a gaudy sunflower.

Then there is the big, Amazonian woman who tries to be cute and cunning, because she sees some baby doll getting the glad hand when she curls up on sofas, and sits on one foot, and perches on the edges of tables, and who only succeeds in looking like a performing elephant instead of a playful kitten when she performs these stunts. And there is the woman without an inch of funny bone in her whole anatomy who tries to tell good stories because she sees some jolly woman raconteur set the table in a roar at dinner parties, and who wonders why people burst into tears instead of into peals of mirth when she recites her carefully memorized jokes.

They couldn’t fill other women’s rôles, yet the big woman could have made us worship her as a goddess if she had stayed on her pedestal instead of coming down and trying to do double somersaults in the ring. We would have listened eagerly enough to intelligent talk from a serious thinker who didn’t try to be funny, for Heaven knows we get tired enough of amateur jokesmiths who think we want to be perpetually tickled in the ribs. Believe me, girls, there is much wisdom in the old proverb that advises the shoemaker to stick to his last. We are most admirable when we are what nature made us with the aid of a few little arts and embellishments to throw the original model up into higher relief. So I counsel you to make the most of yourselves. Abandon the foolish attempt of trying to make yourselves over into a poor copy of some woman who is admired. Charm isn’t standardized. It has a million forms, and every woman should illustrate her own particular version of it.

After all what we call charm is largely a matter of personality and the girl who wishes to cultivate that elusive something that we call personality does well to pay much attention to her dress. This sounds like superfluous advice to the sex whose brains are mostly cut on the bias and shirred in the middle, and which is more concerned over the hang of a skirt than it is over the state of its immortal soul. It is not too much to say that three-fourths of women’s thoughts and interest in life and heart-felt desires and envies are concentrated upon clothes, and the marvel always is that they can put so much effort on a subject and get such poor results.

For the great majority of women only think of dress in terms of fashion, and they follow the mode of the moment as sheep follow their leader over a wall. They wear blue or purple, pink or green, short skirts or long skirts, tight ones or full ones, without any reference to their complexions or whether their ankles are sylphlike or like the legs of a piano, or whether they are living skeletons, or have featherbed figures. The result is that thousands upon thousands of women look as if their worst enemy had bought their clothes, and their hats are a premeditated insult to their faces. But they go their way, serene and happy, having done the worst they could by themselves, but blissful in the knowledge that they are wearing what everybody else is wearing. Apparently it never enters the average woman’s head that by clothing herself in the feminine uniform of the hour she makes herself indistinguishable in the mob, or that she could call attention to herself by breaking away from it, and dressing to suit her own particular type. Still less does it occur to her that her clothes offer her an invaluable mode of self-expression, and that by them she can emphasize her good points and camouflage her defects.

Yet every moving picture, every play she sees, offers a girl an object lesson in the psychology of clothes that she does not heed. She never asks herself why the innocent, trusting maiden, too artless for her own good, always wears a white muslin and a blue sash; why the ingenue is always a mass of fluffy ruffles; why the betrayed heroine always wears a slinky black dress; why the adventuress is clothed in crimson and spangles; why the vamp invariably wears long jade earrings, and a quart of beads, and very little else.

Yet astute stage managers have found that the surest way to make an audience visualize a woman in a certain way is to have her dress the part. A girl might, of course, be as innocent in a crimson dress as a white one; a woman might be as heartbroken in a pink silk and lace negligee as she is in a bedraggled black alpaca, but it would take a long argument to convince us of it, and we wouldn’t weep nearly as freely over her woes as we do when we get an eyeful of her in the clothes that tell us at once just what a poor, innocent, persecuted heroine she is.

Surely this should suggest to every girl the wisdom of retiring to her closet, and having a heart-to-heart session with her wardrobe, and a vivisection party with her character, and thereby try to find out how to dress her soul as well as her body, so as best and most effectively to press-agent her individuality, so to speak.

If she is of the bold and dashing type, let her flaunt herself like a sunflower in daring costumes and flaming colors, but if she is of the quiet and gentle sort, soft fabrics, chiffons and laces and pastel shades belong to her, and make her look like the traditional modest violet that every man dreams of securing as a wife. Let the girl who is flat-chested and athletic rejoice in her sport clothes. That is her note, and brings out a certain piquant boyishness which is her greatest attraction. But let the girl who is plump, with gracious curves, make the most of her femininity by decking herself out in the frilliest frocks that she can find. Each will lose in charm if she swaps her plumage for the other’s.

Dangling ornaments, floating ribbons and jingling bracelets belong to the gay and foolish and frivolous, but they detract from the dignity of the stately, thoughtful, serious-minded woman. A tailor-made suit is equal to a certificate of virtue, and when a girl is applying for a job a plain, dark-colored suit will do more to land her the position than a gilt-edged reference. Nobody ever believes that a girl in a low-necked, no-sleeved frock can ever be a competent business woman. She doesn’t look it. Every woman knows that her eyes seem twice as blue if she has a blue lining to her hat, and that she can turn a spotlight on her every freckle by wearing a spotted dress. In the same way she can bring out her characteristics by the way she dresses. If she wishes to emphasize her cuteness, she can do it by dressing like a baby doll. If she wishes to be thought a goddess, she can add to her divinity by long-trailing robes. If she wishes to be thought a good sport and treated as a pal by men, sport clothes are hers, while if domesticity is her long suit, she can turn the trick by wearing ruffled little white aprons at home. So study your type, girls, and dress the part, if you want to make the most of the attractions with which nature has endowed you.

III

THE ORDINARY WOMAN

I wish that I had the distributing of some of the Carnegie medals for heroes. I would give one to just the Ordinary Woman. It is true that she never manned a lifeboat in a stormy sea, or plunged into a river to save a drowning person. It is true that she never stopped a runaway horse, or dashed into a burning building, or gave any other spectacular exhibition of courage.

She has only stood at her post thirty, or forty, or fifty years, fighting sickness and poverty and loneliness, and disappointment so quietly, with such a Spartan fortitude that the world has never noticed her achievements. Yet, in the presence of the Ordinary Woman, the battle-scarred veteran, with his breast covered with medals signifying valor, may well stand uncovered before one braver than he.

There is nothing high and heroic in her appearance. She is just a commonplace woman, plainly dressed, with a tired face and work-worn hands—the kind of woman that you meet a hundred times a day upon the street without ever giving her a second glance, still less saluting her as a heroine. Nevertheless, as much as the bravest soldier, she is entitled to the cross of the Legion of Honor for distinguished gallantry on the Battlefield of Life.

Years and years ago, when she was fresh and young, and gay, and light-hearted, she was married. Her head, as is the case with most girls, was full of dreams. Her husband was to be a Prince Charming, always tender and considerate and loving, shielding her from every care and worry. Life itself was to be a fairy tale.

One by one the dreams fell away. The husband was a good man, but he grew indifferent to her before long. He ceased to notice when she put on a fresh ribbon. He never paid her the little compliments for which a woman’s soul hungers. He never gave her a kiss or a caress, and their married life sank into a deadly monotony that had no romance to brighten it, no joy or love to lighten it.

Day after day she sewed and cooked and cleaned and mended to make a comfortable home for a man who did not even give her the poor pay of a few words of appreciation. At his worst he was cross and querulous. At his best he was silent, and would gobble his food like a hungry animal and subside into his paper, leaving her to spend a dull and monotonous evening after a dull and monotonous day.