The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays, Vol. 2 (of 2)Linton, E. Lynn (Elizabeth Lynn)
General
The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays, Vol. 2 (of 2)
Linton, E. Lynn (Elizabeth Lynn)
Girls; Women
A lady nomad of this kind, especially one with a daughter, is strictly
orthodox and cultivates with praiseworthy perseverance the society of
any clergyman who may have wandered into the community of which she is
a member. She is punctual in church-going; and the minister is
flattered by her evident appreciation of his sermons, and the
readiness with which she can remember certain points of last Sunday's
discourse. As a rule she is Evangelically inclined, and is as
intolerant of Romanism on the one hand as of Rationalism on the other.
She has seen the evils of both, she says, and quotes the state of Rome
and of Heidelberg in confirmation. She is as strict in morals as in
orthodoxy, and no woman who has got herself talked about, however
innocently, need hope for much mercy at her hands. Her Rhadamanthine
faculty has apparently ample occasion for exercise, for her list of
scandalous chronicles is extensive; and if she is to be believed, she
and her daughter are almost the sole examples of a pure and untainted
womanhood afloat. She is as rigid too, in all matters connected with
her social status; and brings up her daughter in the same way of
thinking. By virtue of the admiral or the major, at peace in his
grave, they are emphatically ladies; and, though nomadic, impecunious,
homeless, and _tant soit peu_ adventuresses, they class themselves as
of the cream of the cream, and despise those whose rank is of the
uncovenanted kind, and who are gentry, may be, by the grace of God
only without any Act of Parliament to help.
Sometimes the lady nomad is a spinster, not necessarily _passée_,
though obviously she cannot be in her first youth; still she may be
young enough to be attractive, and adventurous enough to care to
attract. Women of this kind, unmarried, nomadic and still young, work
themselves into every movement afoot. They even face the perils and
discomforts of war-time, and tell their friends at home that they are
going out as nurses to the wounded. That dash of the adventuress, of
which we have spoken before, runs through all this section of the
social nomads; and one wonders why some uncle or cousin, some aunt or
family friend, does not catch them up in time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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