How or under what influences the unprotected female commences her
tour, who can tell? It will usually be found, if inquiry be made as
to her family, that she has a brother, or a father, or a mother; that
she need not be an unprotected female tourist, had she not elected
that line as the best for her pleasure or her profit. She is seldom
very young;--but neither is she very old. The lady whose age would
admit of her travelling alone without remark rarely chooses to do
so; and when she does, she is not the lady whom we all know as the
unprotected female. The unprotected female must be pretty, or must
at least possess feminine graces which stand in lieu of prettiness,
and which can put forward a just and admitted claim for personal
admiration. She is not rich, and travels generally with economy; but
she is rarely brought to a shift for money, and her economies conceal
themselves gracefully and successfully. She learns the value of every
franc, of every thaler, of every zwansiger as she progresses, and gets
more change out of her sovereigns than any Englishman will do. She
allows herself but few self-indulgences, and controls her appetites.
She can enjoy a good dinner as well as her brother could do; but she
can go without her dinner with a courageous persistence of which her
brother knows nothing. She never pays through the nose in order that
people indifferent to her may think her great or generous, though she
pays always sufficient to escape unsatisfactory noises and to prevent
unpleasant demands. Her dress is quiet and yet attractive; her clothes
fit her well; and if, as one is prone to suspect, they are in great
part the work of her own hand, she must be an industrious woman, able
to go to her needle at night after the heat and dust of the day are
over. Her gloves are never worn at the finger-ends; her hat is never
shapeless, nor are her ribbons ever soiled; the folds of her not too
redundant drapery are never misarranged, confused, or angular. She
never indulges in bright colours, and is always the same, and always
neat; and they who know her best believe that if she were called out of
her room by fire in the middle of the night, she would come forth calm,
in becoming apparel, and ready to take an active part in the emergency
without any infringement on feminine propriety. She is never forward,
nor is she ever bashful. A bashful woman could not play her game,
and a forward woman immediately encounters sorrow when she attempts
to play it. She can decline all overtures of acquaintanceship without
giving offence, and she can glide into intimacies without any apparent
effort. She can speak French with fluency and with much more than
average accuracy, and probably knows something of German and Italian.
Without such accomplishments as these let no woman undertake the part
of an unprotected female tourist. She can converse on almost any
subject; and, if called on to do so, can converse without any subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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