United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
O-Toyo was a darling, but she lacked several things--conversation for
one. You cannot live on giggles. She shall remain unmarried at Nagasaki,
while I roast a battered heart before the shrine of a big Kentucky
blonde, who had for a nurse when she was little a negro “mammy.”
By consequence she has welded on California beauty, Paris dresses,
Eastern culture, Europe trips, and wild Western originality, the queer,
dreamy superstitions of the quarters, and the result is soul-shattering.
And she is but one of many stars.
Item, a maiden who believes in education and possesses it, with a few
hundred thousand dollars to boot and a taste for slumming.
Item, the leader of a sort of informal salon where girls congregate,
read papers, and daringly discuss metaphysical problems and candy--a
sloe-eyed, black-browed, imperious maiden she.
Item, a very small maiden, absolutely without reverence, who can in one
swift sentence trample upon and leave gasping half a dozen young men.
Item, a millionairess, burdened with her money, lonely, caustic, with
a tongue keen as a sword, yearning for a sphere, but chained up to the
rock of her vast possessions.
Item, a typewriter maiden earning her own bread in this big city,
because she doesn't think a girl ought to be a burden on her parents,
who quotes Theophile Gautier and moves through the world manfully, much
respected for all her twenty inexperienced summers.
Item, a woman from cloud-land who has no history in the past or future,
but is discreetly of the present, and strives for the confidences
of male humanity on the grounds of “sympathy” (methinks this is not
altogether a new type).
Item, a girl in a “dive,” blessed with a Greek head and eyes, that seem
to speak all that is best and sweetest in the world. But woe is me! She
has no ideas in this world or the next beyond the consumption of beer
(a commission on each bottle), and protests that she sings the songs
allotted to her nightly without more than the vaguest notion of their
meaning.
Sweet and comely are the maidens of Devonshire; delicate and of gracious
seeming those who live in the pleasant places of London; fascinating for
all their demureness the damsels of France, clinging closely to their
mothers, with large eyes wondering at the wicked world; excellent in her
own place and to those who understand her is the Anglo-Indian “spin” in
her second season; but the girls of America are above and beyond them
all. They are clever, they can talk--yea, it is said that they think.
Certainly they have an appearance of so doing which is delightfully
deceptive.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account