第54章

As we went to dinner, in a large dining-room, upon our arrival at the Glen House, it seemed to me that the guests were the most refined and elegant in their general appearance of any company I had seen since my departure, and I had a pleasant New-English feeling of self-gratulation. But we were drawn up into line directly opposite a row of young girls, who really made me very uncomfortable. They were at an advanced stage of their dinner when we entered, and they devoted themselves to making observations. It was not curiosity, or admiration, or astonishment, or horror. It was simply fixedness. They displayed no emotion whatever, but every time your glance reached within forty-five degrees of them, there they were "staring right on with calm, eternal eyes," and kept at it till the servants created a diversion with the dessert. Now, if there is any thing that annoys and disconcerts me, it is to be looked at. Some women would have put them down, but I never can put anybody down. It is as much as I can do to hold my own,--and more, unless I am with well-bred people who always keep their equilibriums. One of these girls was the companion of a venerable and courtly gentleman; and the thought arose, how is it possible for this girl to have possibly that man's blood in her veins, certainly the aroma of his life floating around her, and the faultless model of his demeanor before her, and not be the mirror of every grace? Of how little avail is birth or breeding, if the instinct of politeness be not in the heart. That last remark, however, must "right about face" in order to be just. If the instincts be true, birth and breeding are comparatively of no account, for the heart will dictate to the quick eye and hand and voice the proper course; but where the instincts are wanting, breeding is indispensable to supply the deficiency. What one cannot do by nature he must do by drill. Sometimes it seems to me that young girlhood is intolerable. There is much delightful writing about it,--rose-buds and peach-blossoms and timid fawns; but the timid fawns are scarce in streets and hotels and schools,--or perhaps it is that the fawns who are not timid draw all eyes upon themselves, and make an impression entirely disproportionate to their numbers. I am thinking now, I regret to say, of New England young girls. Where they are charming, they are irresistible; they need yield to nobody in the known world.

But I do think that an uninteresting Yankee girl is the most uninteresting of all created objects. Southern girls have almost always tender voices and soft manners. Arrant nonsense comes from their lips with such sweet syllabic flow, such little ripples of pronunciation and musical interludes, that you are attracted and held without the smallest regard to what they are saying. I could sit for hours and hear two of them chattering over a checker-board for the pleasure of the silvery, tinkling music of their voices. But woe is me for the voices, male and female, that you so often hear in New England,--the harsh, strident voices, the monotonous, cranky, yanky, filing, rasping voices, without modulation, all rise and no fall, a monotonous discord, no soul, no feeling, and no counterfeit of it, loud, positive, angular, and awful. Indeed, I do not see how we New-Englanders are ever to rid ourselves of the reproach of our voices. The number of people who speak well is not large enough materially to influence the rest.

Teachers do not teach speaking in school,--they certainly did not in my day, and I have no reason to suppose from results that they do now,--and parents do not teach it at home, for the simple reason, I suppose, that they do not know it themselves.

We can all perceive the discord; but how to produce concord, that is the question. This one thing, however, is practicable if sweetness cannot be increased, volume can be diminished.

If you cannot make the right kind of noise, you can at least make as little as possible of the wrong kind. Often the discord extends to manners. Public conveyances and public places produce so many girls who are not gentle, retiring, shady, attractive. They are flingy and sharp and saucy, without being piquant. They take on airs without having the beauty or the brilliancy which alone makes airs delightful.

They agonize to make an impression, and they make it, but not always in the line of their intent. Setting out to be picturesque, they become uncouth. They are ridiculous when they mean to be interesting, and silly when they try to be playful. If they would only leave off attitudinizing, one would he appeased. It may not be possible to acquire agreeable manners, any more than a pleasant voice; but it is possible to be quiet. But no suspicion of defect seems ever to have penetrated the bosoms of such girls. They act as if they thought attention was admiration. Levity they mistake for vivacity. Peevishness is elegance. Boldness is dignity.

Rudeness is savoir faire Boisterousness is their vulgate for youthful high spirits.

And what, let me ask just here, is the meaning of the small waists that girls are cramming their lives into? I thought tight-lacing was an effete superstition clean gone forever.