Perhaps if the author of “Les Misérables” saw her at certain times he might use the qualified praise he applied to the Parisians when he called them “frivolous but intelligent.” Yet if St. Jerome had seen her on the beach I hardly think he could have had the heart to say, “I entirely forbid a young lady to bathe.” Her whole effect is qualifying. She carries into all her enthusiasms a modifying reservation. The trait is typified and illustrated for us when we see her coming home from the reading club on a wheel, or carrying her novel to breakfast. The social hysteric always is sure that something dreadful is going to happen, and then, in one of those sensational hairbreadth escapes in which nature delights, the thing does not happen. The hysteric has overlooked the reservation by which the fad escapes monomania, by which the enthusiasm is subordinated to its owner. [Illustration] Intermittently her enthusiasms bring up the venerable charge of mannishness. A hundred years ago the editor of the London “Times” complained savagely that women were becoming wickedly masculine. “Their hunting, shooting, driving, cricketing, fencing, faroing and skating,” he cried, “present a monstrous chaos of absurdity not only making day and night hideous but the sex itself equivocal. Lady-men or men-ladies, ‘you’ll say it’s Persian, but let it be changed.’” Ptahhotpou the ancient Egyptian has something to the same effect, but I have forgotten his phrase. [Illustration] [Illustration] V “WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOCIETY” [Illustration] One day it happened with me, as with many another impatient traveler, that I had to spend two hours between trains in a certain obscure town. Perhaps I should say, in a certain obscure railway station, for the town was singularly vague, uninviting and irresponsive, not at all the sort of place that one would expect to know what to do with. It was, indeed, the fragment of a town, as if, in the sprinkling of villages along the railway, the material at this point ran short, leaving barely a sufficient supply of elemental features. And being confronted by the unprofitableness of the prospect,--by the drowsy, straggling street, running (the word sounds ironical) from the station, the unfriendly stare of the town hall, plastered over with play bills; the sunburned whiteness of the little church; the obvious taciturnity of the man smoking in front of the general merchandise store,--I bought the local paper, for there was a local paper, with a “patent outside,” that occurred every Friday morning. And the first thing that struck my eye in the local paper was a conspicuous headline: “What is Going on in Society.”