The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, January 17, 1904, Page 6

THE SAN FRANCISCO SUNDAY CALL. of pretty manners Iz to put it plainly, bsence of pretti- The athletic with her foot and elves? ed from the highways that at into the open, on, and hidden r his own secret d seen ttering essay a willing slave to ts that so much more mannish of the over- t than the letic girls of to- fact remains th the fer recedes, be- as you on foot nrough the in review see in all - idea 1l you 1d expres- it the = the cer- ot miles of who lasses display mod- »u may be pretty ght fre m turn there, ffirm this where free- carried to ng mot- that when act of cour- and even equen omen (and they suffer brush of are for the man’s ar bitter o T n's manners talk contempt worse ir anners of r it. Where eless, modest, ill- the gracious amen- social and family fe found men only too w et themselves go on in their carding those re- hid their seamy themselves as fro 1 support of incal- drawn, for to leave equivalent to never s at the proper just as a slovenly negligence ably degrades and does a careless bear- uct, and rapid at is the reason of good breeding in both women and men There are three this ie the first and that there ar - reasons—of which most important, not enough men to go round: thus ast women have no chance of marria d moth- erhoud, which is the state for which they were born, nature baving em-, aw that for Jack and com- with joy, lover gait corre starved heart w man take 1 the m with he pond the st and soften her omes n wh because st my a lov mains long, neither to soured by man, since he into her sche There is, of ¢ women and tcpid swe tened nor does not enter rce a certa minority wish of to marry, & but again the B men sufficiently tr to overcom their prejudices, and do they not un flat- ter themselves brain and will liv in a celibate © woman who, le ful career that has counts herself back on a succe in it, had no oy, is not a ove ha woman at all, but a freak of nature, in which something warm and human has by accident been left out, rendering her frustrate and incomplete The second reason (and it is a very grave one) for the general discourtesy between the sexe is the ing in our midst of a class of women, s married, st up al- cefully decently, and manners msa described as carneying or fa according to taste, Z19 v < IITIH 70107 LT GHEIERAIION WE, BURIED L1, JHAT WERE ZEFY g = - take them about, amuse them, pay for their menus plaisers, and give them generally what they call “a good time” —and at what a price! Men are not good.at class ion, have not time to differentiate between wbmen and women, thus the pure women are made to suffer for the fast, apart from those wno enjoy the pleas- ures flung to them by man’s contempt- uous hand, having indeed no taste for a familiarity that strikes at the very root of their self-respect and womanli- ness. OF IH7 QLD—FHSHIONTD PEIIERI. ™ I do not say that such women are met everywhere—there are vast tracts of English society into which they have never penetrated, but that they exist as a type is painfully well known to many a fresh young girl, who sees her bit of pleasure filched from her by those who, having eaten their cake, are determined to have it also. It is a misfortune, I know, to feel ON THE DECAY OF PREITY MANNERS IN WOMEN .'BY HEAEN MATHERS (Aut]mg‘ Comin’ thro’ the young inside and be old out. butfthere are other ways of working off this vitality than by aping Ninon de I"En- clos’ airs, and is not the antagonistic attitude of daughters to mothers now- adays, often due to the total lack of dignity with which these mothers be- have? . There is something revolting in the sight of clean, fresh-faced boys danc- ing gttendance on women whose sons are of the same age as themselves— youth to youth—age to age—dignity to the meridian of life, and the ripe charm that experience gives, thus should it be now, as it has in the past. I is a hard saying, but it seems to me that with our own dear mothers of the last generation we buried all that are left of the old-fashioned pattern, and that until the present day women ini- tlate a vast forward movement to a change in manner toward men so long will men fail in theirs toward, the other sex. The remedy lies inf‘the women's own hands—where shall they make a beginning? From time immemorial they have been the bulwark of thecountry, whose importance as rearers of sons and daughters is more vital, more impor- tant to the state than the statesmen themselves and without whom (should they become universally corrupt) Eng- land must go to pieces, inevitably de- stroyed like other great nations, from within, For to keep the home together, to look properly after husband and chil- dren, fulfilling daily a thousand acts of duty that no cne clse can, that is the work for which woman was born, and in the main it is very strenuous work, engaging every faculty of heart and brain, and not all the successes of women who usurp men’s places and professions will leave the mark on pos- terity that this one, by the bringing up of her sons, the molding of her hus- band, will. There is a third reason for the decay in courtesy between men and women— and perhaps it is the saddest and most menacing to all our womanhood (be- ing as it is almost a direct result of the two reasons I have given above). It is when a qertain type of girl realizes that in addition to the scarcity of men her chances of marriage are still fur- ther reduced by the depredations of slder women, and too often she be- comes a free lance, picking up eagerly a bit of pleasure here and there and gradually cheapening herself to the res- taurant or the theater, the smoke and the whisky-and-soda girl, who no more exacts fine manners from man than he expects them-of b Probably there is no real vice in her, but knowing that there is no fun possible to her without a man to take her about, she drifts into a false position, and sometimes, very rarely, is married by a man whose rep- utation is as off-color as her own. For men worth having decline to rry the girls who place their good looks, their charm, their agreeable company at the disposal uf chance comrades. As a rule a man marries because he wants some particular woman all to himself, but is it to be wondered at that between his disgust at grandmothers, who ape the manners of girls of 16, and contempt for the facile girls who will go anywhere, do anything he pieases, a man's own manners and self-restraint deterio- rate, and he decides not to marry at all? With the whole dessert.lald on the table before him, he reckons that he would be a fool to sit down for the rest of his life with an especial fruit or diet, and, often disgusted with the profu- sion, he turns his back on the banquet and will have none of it. If a man of breeding (and though some female mentbers of the-aristocracy set the worst examples of all. their men who despise them, never show it) he will keep silence, and only by his avold- ance of women show his contempt for them, but the harshest misogynist of them all may have all the harm light women have done him undone by a sin- gle good one, and if he go sufficiently zar afleld he can still find her. For as sure!y as violets hide under their green leaves, and come back year by year to rejoice our hearts, so surely do good, pretty and charming girls lurk In this Island of ours, only awaiting the resolute seeker, breathing that atmos- phere of womaliness, of charm, natural to them as the perfume is to the violet, being the emanation of physical, moral and mental health. From them you will get the old fashioned, pretty man- ner that answered so much better with our mothers and grandmothers, that answered so much better (in the mat- ter of love than the rude, the car- neying and the so-called fascinating one of to-day Roughly, then, we may divide women into two classes nowadays, those who use violent, and meretricious means to attract men for mercenary purposes, and women who deliberately revolt men by their aggfessively rude manners, claiming not only an equal status, but an actual super®ority over them in phy- sique, brains and position, so that one might suppose theif aim to be a race of brainy Amazons, placing pigmy man behind them for protection and patron- age. That women must work is one of the sad conditions of their overpowering Lumbers; it may also be taken as granted that no woman likes long and sustained effort, for which, as fashioned by nature, she is eminently unfitted; still she can do that work quietly If she pleases, and there is no need to antag- onize by her attitude the only legiti- fnate worker in the open market that God and nature ever intended—man. As I said before, work she has enough at home, and to spare. Let her then, with her sisters, turn over a new leaf— the grandmothers discard their wigs and capering foolishnesses, the married women who cannot live without admir- ation turn to the cultivation of their homes, the girls who are contemptu- ously allowed to share men’s pleasures emigrate, and become honest wives of honest men; then, though theres must still remain a vast amount of suffering, incomplete womanhood, we may look for a'return of those pretty manners in women that men secretly cherish so deeply, and to meet which their hom- age, so long forgotten, will inevitably spring again. HELEN MATHERS. RS. HELPINGHAND was to any sort of tr brutality the flizhty, the ridiculo and can only even, rather than let go of men who w ithdraw into themselves, standing - . l "By Nicholas Nemo‘I‘ % 2 i, was always August Comte or the strong on the uplifting of the oppressed and the downtrod- den. She was firmly con- vinced that her mission in life was to go about doing good—gen- erally to people who wanted to be let @lope. She was president of the So- ciety for the Suppression of Self-re- spect in the Tenement and was a direc- tor of the Anti-Sunday Growler Asso- ciation and the Woman's League for the Dissemination of Religious and Scientific Literature Among the Indi- gent—and indignant. She was in great demand at charitable con- ventions and meetings for the discus- sion of ways and means to impress the poor with the degradation of their con- dition and the great benevolence those who were spending time money to uplift them. The fact that Mrs. Melpinghand had & husban@ and a son at the place which she sometimes called home had very little to with her actions. A new day he loud- and the man who thought her lot in life to ply the darning needle or stand at the throttle of the kitchen runge was likely to wake up some day and ring down the cur- tain on his imitation of Rip Van Win- kie. The new mission of woman, as she saw it, was to seek out suffering and relieve it. If suffering didn’t want to be relieved the angel of mercy in _ ettendance on the case should be em- powered to call in a poriceman to hold it while the relief was poured down its throat. If there was nothing doing in the suffering line at first there was likely to be plenty very soon after Mrs. Helpinghand hove in sight. In addition to her other duties this tireless helper found time occasionally to sort out a few combustible thoughts of and do d dawued for women, 1y declar that it and throw them together in words that burned—or would have if there had been such a thing as justice in the land. She was the author of that highly in- teresting and widely popular work, “Some Paupers I Have Helped,” and the Other Half Gives” was a contribution from her gifted pen on the economic and sociological impor- tance of charitable euchres. But she was never so much in her element as when she was balancing herself care- fully on a three-legzed chair in a tene- ment boudoir and impartiag useful in- formation to a Yiddish mother on the impropriety of children exercising vio- lently for at least two hours after eat- ing, or the awful moral and social con- sequences involved in the practice of the gentle art commonly known as “rushing the growler.” The fact that the mother aforesaid had a fluent mas- tery of between eight and nine Eng- lish words was no barrier to Mrs. Help- inghand’s activi The saloon evil was the theme on which she waxed particularly strong. No one could excel her in pointing out to the humble workingman how much more desirable it was to spend his even- ings, up to and including his Sundays, in his cozy two-room apartments in the bosom of his family of eight chil- dren than to waste his substance in riotous 1iving at 5 cents per riot in some gilded palace of sin where the beer dieth not and the limburger is not quenched. If diversion is desired, she would say, what could be better than a little visit to the branch of the Bib- liotheque de Carnegie just around the corner, where a copy of the North American Review was always on tap for those who wished to brush up a lit- tle on the status of the latest Panama canal treaty or were thirsting for infor- mation on the sociological significance of William Watson. For those who de- sired more frivolous literature. there rather late but ever delightful Jona- than Edwards. If she could manage to lay alongside a young lady in her teens with ad- vanced views on the engrossing sub- ject of shirt waists or a foot that need- ed exercise with a musical accompani- ment, this tireless renovator of the universe would suggest a course in sewing lessons or a round or two with Delsarte. Nor did the small boys es- cape her eagle eye and fostering care. The long range cigarette and the craps that cheer but do not alleviate were her_pet particular abominations, and in her most effective manner she would remove the : d and reveal to the juvenile sinner the depths of the awful abyss over which he was hovering. In- stead of “Deadeye Dick, the Bully or the Bronx,” she would recommend a handsomely bound copy of *“The Hero- ism of Harry,” a true story of a poor but honest newsboy, who supported his mother and three small brothers and put his big sister through college by writing stories for the magazines after his day’s work was done. By these means she confidently expected to snatch the brand frem the burning be- fore it had fairly begun to smoke—or drink. The old thecry that people usually dislike the things that are supposed to be good for them never had a better il- lustration than in the case of Mrs. Helpinghand. If the extent to which a thing 1Is disliked and consistently avoided is anv indication of its degree of goodness, she had all the agencies for the betterment of the human race beaten out at the start. Whenever she hove in sight at the end of the block there was a general dispersion of the population, comparable only with the effect of an annoupcement of a re- quired course in bathing in a ten-cent lodging-house. If she had been a man she would probably have been dropped gently but firmly off the fire escape at or about the fourth story, but being a woman she was permitted to continue on her devastating career unharmed. This fact may give a hint as to the correct cxplanation of the well-known fact that so many social reformers are old women. But we must hasten on to the end of Mrs. Helpinghand's exciting career lest some one break it off before we get there. It has been intimated above that she was a more or less proud parent of a limited edition of humanity in the shape of a son. When she started out on her devastating career of dredging the depths of poverty and vice along the Bowery she had turned her tender offspring over to a select school for the Instruction of the unfortunate scions of bullionocracy. It was her théory that a boy who had the good judgment to select the right kind of parents couldn’t possibly fly the track or get his signals mixed. Imagine her pained surprise, therefore, on her return from one of her periodical excursions into the murky depths of East Houston street to learn that her son had cov- ered himself with glory and large black and blue spots as the leader of a gang of amateur bandits who had held up a candy store at the combined muzzles of a Flobert rifle and an iron dumb- bell and had lifted $3 37 out of the cash drawer. It was her sad fate to learn that while she was engaged in saving the heathen on the other side of town, her son had been acquiring a large library of carefully selected yel- low-backs, subsisting meanwhile én a hearty diet of cigarettes and stale beer. The boy's father figured prominently in the personal property tax list, so it ‘was conclusively proved that the crime had been committed by a gang of Bast, Side toughs, but Mrs. Helpinghand's philanthropic motives had recelved their deathblow. She had demonstrat- ed to her own satisfaction that while a thankless child is something near as sharp as a serpent’s tooth, the condi- tion is sadly aggravated when the par- ent has contributed materially to the sharpening process. She had learned, also, that while charity may begin at home, it often requires special watch- fulness to keep it there. . (Copyright, 1903, by Albert Britt.) (Copyright, 1903, by Steve Floyd, N. Y.) NCE upon a time there lived in O the town of Hazel Green, which is the metropolis of Rowan Coun- ty, a fledgling of the name of Ab- ner Tuthill, Abner was what women of maturity, with daughters to spare, call a perfect- ly grand person. That is, he had set ways, .worked like a dog for a living, saved his wages, taught a Bible class. sang in the choir, chipped in wheneyer the foreign mission basket was passed around ard did not use cuss words or tobacco or listen to the men tell naughty stories. To reduce it to a showdown, Abner was an out-and-out virgin. Fact is, he was just the dearest, darlingest, gen- tlemanliest young gentleman that could possibly be imagined. While Abner was perfectly good and pure, he was not the least bit narrow- minded or unreascnable. Not at all so. He simply believed in drawing the line at the proper place. That was all. Although he was bitterly opposed to round dances, he hadn't the slightest objection to a quadrille. And while he felt in his heart that it was exceedingly wicked to play enchre, he w just that liberal-minded that he did not disap- prove of a game of smut if it was not allowed to last one minute after 12, if played on Saturday night. Neither did he object to home-made blackberry cordial, but, of course, he knew that it was a great sin to even taste bought liquor, so he never did. He knew that {t was wrong to raffle things off in stores or saloons, but he was broad enough to take a chance on a piece of fancy work if the entire proceeds went to the church. Abner was head clerk in the general store run by Philpott, Hargis & Snod- grass, and was 8o popular with every- body that the other clerk really had nothing to do but sweep out the store, trim the lamps, wipe mold off the shoes and keep the dust off the coun- | L — ter, except during the Saturday rush, when, of course, it was simply out of the question for Abmer to wait on every one, even though they did want him to. Abner was a very valuable man to his firm. A whole lot of folks sald it wouldn’t surprise them at all to see Philpott, Hargis & Snodgrass go to the wall if he ever took the notion into his head to quit them. But they argued that he wouldn’t do that, for he had been with them ever since Wilse Gilma- not shot Colonel Jett Cockrill, and they always gave him a ten dollar gold piece for Christmas and let him have what- ever he wanted out of the stock at ac- tual cost. Furthermore, when he was taken down with slow fever and did not round-to for a whole month, his salary went on just the same as if he had earned it, which was mighty kind of Philpott, Hargis & Snodgrass, insomuch as they paid him a corking big sum— sixty dollars a month. As might naturally be supposed, Ab- ner in time fell in love. Beatrice Sou- ders was her name. Beatrice was a most adorable girl, of a religious turn of mind and an excellent family. Her mother will be recalled as Leonile Gambrill, a one-time belle of the coun- ty, and granddaughter of Major Lige Gambrill, who ran for Governor on the Prohibition ticket and was defeated by fraud. On her father's side Beatrice was re- lated to the Souderses, who owned the Cypressview plantation in Henderson County until the bank foreclosed the mortgage. So it can readily be seen that her connections were of the very best. ‘To Abner’s way of thinking there was but one girl in all the world who was perfectly beautiful and really worth having. That girl’s name was Beatrice. Of course, he was willing to admit that there were other nice young ladles, but somehow there was a something or THE LOVER WHO SULRED —+By Billy BurgundyT other about Beatrice which made har ever so awfully Jlovable He didn't know himself exactly what it was, but it was, and that was all he needed to know. Well, to get to the potnt, Abner saved his money until he was strong enough to go into business for himself. And as he calculated that there was more room for a new store in New York City than there was in Hazel Green, he pulled up stakes and made for the big town. It was agreed between him and Bea- trice that as soon as hé got everything in tip-top shape he would wire her to come or and they would be married in Grace Church, so that there would be a big piece in the papers about it. For the first few weeks New York City was just about all Abner could stand. He worked in his store from daylight till dark, and spent the even- ings in his room writing wishy-washy- slush-gush-mush to the mainspring of his heart. He was weak from home- sickness and could not retain anything more nourishing than a cabinet photo of Beatrice. ‘When Abner got things the way he wanted them, he decided to rush down to the telegraph office and concentrate the glad tidings into ten words. Not having seen the mailn street during daylight he chose to foot it. As he stepped into the thoroughfare and got his first glance at the smartly attired damsels he almost lost his breath. Before he had covered the first block he was almbst willing to admit that some of them were as pretty as Beatrice. Before he had gone two blocks he was sure that they were, and when he finally reached the tick-tick- ery he wrote the following message: “Miss Beatrice Souders, Hazel Green: “Never mind. Don't come. “ABNER.” Moral—Never pick a life-companion until you have seen a full line of sar.- ples.