XIX
The Club of the Bachelor Maids
PROFESSOR Maturin told me that he was convinced, after very brief cogitation, that no one but his young friend Portia could have caused him to receive the impressively simple card which lay before him, reading: “The Pleasure of your Company is requested at the First Annual Gentlemen’s Day at the Club of the Bachelor Maids.” Therefore, before dispatching his acknowledgment to the house committee, he wrote to Portia that he should be more than happy to accept the invitation if she would be good enough to accompany him and see him safely through. To this she acceded with a promptness that implied her anticipation of the suggestion; and so the designated afternoon found them entering the portal together. I quote the account of his experiences as exactly as I can remember it.
“The house, which had been remodelled out of two dwellings in the fifties near the avenue, was very interestingly although simply furnished, in colonial fashion for the most part. There was a spacious public room with tapestried walls and wicker furniture, a library and a reading-room with home-like fireplaces, and an extensive lunch and dinner-room in mahogany and cream. I understood that there were also Turkish baths in the basement, and a sun parlor and a garden on the roof, but these were not shown.
“When I turned my attention from the furnishings to the company which had assembled in the larger rooms, I realized the truth of a recent observation that our American women are steadily improving in personal appearance. There was never, to be sure, any crying need for such improvement. Yet, after examining the portraits of early American women by Copley, West, and Stuart, hung in the dinner-room, or the loan collection of Malbone and Staigg miniatures in the library, it was impossible not to be forcibly struck by the living faces about them. Whether due to the operation of natural selection or to our national crossing of races, to modern intellectual advancement or to contemporary social emphasis on better air, food, and exercise, I cannot say. But the superiority of the modern women in symmetry and grace, delicacy and modulation of coloring, and in variety and individuality of expression, was beyond question. The splendid carriage of many of the guests and their refined voices, Mr. Henry James to the contrary notwithstanding, were a delight at the moment, and have been a pleasant memory ever since.
“Portia was so much pleased at my pleasure, that she was quite willingly drawn to a recess whence I could look and where she could elucidate without interruption. There she told me what she could concerning the possessors of such aesthetic mouths, lustrous eyes, and autumn-tinted hair as especially fascinated my gaze.
“I ventured also to inquire about the wearers of particular gowns, for even my masculine eye could perceive, here and there, certain rare harmonies of costume with appearance and bearing, and I was flattered to be told of almost every person who thus attracted my attention that she was generally thought to be especially interesting. Whereupon I jotted down in my pilgrim’s scrip the observation that, in spite of fashion, dress may yet sometimes become a subtle expression of personality. Portia, indeed, told me that fashion troubled some of these ladies so little that one of them had made an aphorism to the effect that ‘Individual women are seldom in fashion; they are usually in advance of it.’ Which saying I remembered instead of my own.
“This phrase and its maker, a gifted designer of jewelry, deflected our conversation to the subject of occupations, it being a qualification for membership in the club that ‘one must be somebody or do something for one’s self,’ as Portia put it; a requirement more strictly enforced than that of the celibacy implied by the name of the organization. As one member and another appeared or passed with her guests, Portia singled out for me the architect and the decorator who had planned and furnished the house, and then the florist who had arranged the decorations, and the caterer who had provided the unique refreshments of the day. There were also numerous librarians and settlement workers, two successful real estate operators, and the manager of an important branch of the office work of a huge life insurance company. One handsome, middle-aged woman, that I took to be one of the philanthropic patrons who had made the club’s equipment possible, Portia singled out as a practitioner of what struck me as the most interesting profession of all—a department-store critic. It was her function to make a daily survey of every part of one of our immense emporiums in order, from her observation, her knowledge of other shops, and of their patrons’ tastes, to make suggestions for improvements in stock, display, or service. I saw also a number of artists and authors, reviewers and publishers’ readers. In one of the rooms an excellent programme was being rendered by several members representative of a musical group, which alternated with similar literary, artistic, and dramatic coteries, in providing entertainment for a series of weekly club evenings throughout the winter.
“Upon my making particular inquiry concerning such of the club’s members as were graduates of our colleges for women, Portia for a time devoted her attention to representatives of that class. A number of these, naturally enough, were college instructors. Several were physicians and hospital officials; one, an attorney, was probation officer in a juvenile court; two were on the editorial staff of newspapers. Many found regular employment in religious or philanthropic enterprises; only one was in business—as assistant to the secretary of a large electrical company.
“When I was unoriginal enough to ask the conventional question concerning the general attitude of college women toward marriage, Portia gave what I instantly recognized as the only possible answer, inconclusive as it was: the college woman was as yet too recent a phenomenon for any generalization about her to be safe. The particular question of her attitude to marriage could be solved only by the well-nigh impossible process of comparing equal groups of college and non-college women of the same social kind. Such indications as there were showed no great differences, except perhaps that college women were likely to marry somewhat later.
“Indeed, I found that the club was intended, for one thing, to be a sort of outpost for studying and, if need be, aiding the solution of just such problems in the economic and social life of women, ‘especially of such as would go a-careering,’ in the words of the phrase-maker. Among the many announcements on a bulletin board, I saw that a well-known litterateur—or should one say litteratrice?—was to speak on Madame de Staël, George Sand, and Mrs. Browning; a philanthropist on Madame Roland and the Countess Schimmelmann; a psychologist on Marie Bashkirtseff and Mary MacLean. And there were lists of conferences on physiology and hygiene, sociology and economics, and religion and philanthropy, in addition to announcements of the weekly entertainments already mentioned.
“Another bulletin bore an equal number of announcements of all sorts of outside recreations, from the opera and selected theatres to golf and Adirondack camps.
“In all of its activities the organization displayed not only the same energy but also the same breadth of view. The cant of sentimentality and the anti-cant of grievance were alike conspicuously absent. The club picture gallery included Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel’ and Alma-Tadema’s ‘Cleopatra,’ as well as portraits of Susan B. Anthony and the Countess of Warwick. Its library contained social studies as unlike as Aristophanes’ ‘Ladies in Parliament’ and Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘Vindication of the Rights of Women;’ and philosophic deductions as opposed as Comte’s ‘Worship of Women’ and Schopenhauer’s ‘Woman as Insufficient Reason.’ The only piece of militant feminism anywhere to be seen was one of a series of inscriptions on oaken panels:
On closer inspection, I found this to be a quotation from Ariosto. Beside it was an inscription from Herbert Spencer which read: ‘If women comprehended all that is contained in the domestic sphere, they would ask no other.’ That the club realized the humorous as well as the serious suggestion of such juxtaposition was proved by one of the mantelpieces, where rested side by side an effigy of Egypt’s great queen Hatasu, and a fragment of a Roman matron’s epitaph, reading, ‘She stayed at home and span.’
“When I asked Portia to what conclusions, if any, her club life had led her, she confessed to only a few, and those very tentative. As compared with the married women of her acquaintance whose cultivation was equal to that of her fellow club members, most of the latter appeared over-serious, self-distrustful, or inconsistent. A few seemed to find full activity and satisfaction in careers for which they obviously possessed decided gifts. But the majority, after a certain eagerness for experience and self-realization had become satisfied, seemed to be but half-heartedly filling in their time while anticipating or desiring something else. This attitude, together with the census statistics, appeared to indicate that the chief career for the great majority of women was still through marriage. Whether it was becoming less so for the kind of women the club comprised, and if this were the case, what was the alternative—these were among the questions upon which the organization held itself open to conviction.
“For herself, Portia was happy still to be in the mood of acquisition: there were many things that she was eager to learn and to experience before it became time to inquire what she was going to be. As yet she had got no further than realizing that, while being a bachelor woman seemed to have obvious limitations, it was surely extremely pleasant to be a bachelor maid.
“I very honestly replied that, considering her youth and her opportunities, I would not have her feel differently—certainly not at present.”