Letters of Peregrine PickleUpton, George P. (George Putnam)
General
Letters of Peregrine Pickle
Upton, George P. (George Putnam)
Chicago (Ill.) -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
This story of chances is an old, old story. It is a failing of human
nature. There isn't a young woman in the world who has been gazed
at admiringly by a young man, but has imagination strong enough
to convert that look into a chance. That story won't do. I want
something more definite.
In the second place, I would like to know if any of my correspondents
who have had so many chances improved one of them and got married?
If so, I would like again to know, what in the world you are
complaining of? Is it quite complimentary to your other half, who
buys your bonnets, provides your beefsteaks, pays your washerwoman,
and looks after the pocket-book side of your marital contract? With
that estimable man in your eye--and I should hate to deny in your
presence, Madame, that he was not estimable--how can you have the
assurance to deny that there are women who would marry, if they had
the chance? Are the grapes which grow on your vines soured? Has the
honeymoon grown bitter in its waxings and wanings? Have you put your
finger in the fire and been burned?
I hope not, but it looks so, my dear--it looks so.
I have a letter from still another correspondent--written in a
savage, vinegary sort of chirography--who lugs in that stale crowd,
Anna Dickinson, Miss Anthony, etc., to prove that women will not
always marry when they have a chance. I do not recognize anything
womanly in these clamorous individuals bawling from stumps, and
crying themselves hoarse for rights which any of them can have if
they have sense enough to take them. If a woman will deliberately
unsex herself, she has no right to expect chances. If she ever, by
some mysterious dispensation of Divine Providence, gets a chance,
it is kindness to the dumb brute who gave her the chance, when she
refuses it. The good God, when He established the relation of the
sexes, never intended that man should ally himself to a woman with
ice-water in her veins and a head full of syllogisms. He might as
well marry a treatise on metaphysics and have done with it. I am sick
of this crowd of one-idea women who are invariably trotted out when
it is necessary to do or say anything. They are exceptions to all
rules, and prove nothing. A cow with five legs and a hen with no tail
furnish no data from which to judge of the general family of cows and
hens.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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