Oh, Guy! who, among your high-toned lady friends on Sparks Street
to-morrow will recognize in you the fast midnight rambler, that the pale
winter moon and the cold silent stars see in you to-night? You, the
brilliant one of Ottawa's best drawing-rooms, ejaculating all the hard
words you know, because you can't open the door with a lead pencil, nor
find the handle on the wrong side. How well you have learned the art of
veneering your character! Is it then such a breach of Christian charity
to discuss on open pages, Guy Elersley by daylight, and Guy Elersley by
lamplight? Any one given to moralizing, may surely ask the ladies of
Ottawa, if they have ever stopped to think those simple things over. If
all their acknowledged purity, dignity and womanly attraction were worth
no more than to lay them within the ready grasp of the sons of this
century of materialism! Do they never realize how infinitely superior
they are to the men of their own days, and do they ever treat them with
the contempt and indifference that are at best their due? If such were
indeed the case, woman would be more independent in her social standing
than she is to-day, but, I blush to say it--there are those among
Ottawa's fair ones, who are flattered by the attentions and compliments
of such as live these two lives of daylight and lamp-light;--flattered
that an arm should encircle their waists in the dance, which is unworthy
of cleaning the shoes they wear, or sweeping the ground they
tread,--flattered by the attentions and flighty words falling from lips
across whose threshold comes the foul breath of sin and dissipation.
Such is the dignity of the youth of our century; such is the brazen
insolence which causes them to establish themselves as the social equals
of well bred women.
Oh, for the long sought day of woman's emancipation, when she will be
free, in her own right, to scorn from the pedestal of her superiority,
the audacity of the man who shows himself by daylight to the world to be
that high society exacts from him, but whose superficial virtues set
with the evening sun, leaving in their temporary dwelling place, the
craving of material nature to be gratified. Such are the heroes of our
popular novels, such are the heroes of our actual society, such are our
male relatives, and yet women seem to be satisfied that things should
remain thus. If every woman would determine within herself to accomplish
the whole or part of the grand mission that is at the mercy of her own
hands, how soon would we have cause to rejoice and thank Providence for
the great reformation in morals which must be a necessary consequence of
such a determination?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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