Pretty Simpletons.

Evening Star, Issue 8716, 7 January 1892, Page 3

Pretty Simpletons.

♦ ■ We had thought that the oult of the pretty simpleton had died away, like the cult of " sensibility" which distinguished Mioa Austen's time, and with it the fear of the pretty woman of cultivation. _ We notice, however, that Mrs Snoad, president of the Women's Progressive Society, at the end of a most sensible and, indeed, able letter advising girla what to do if they find life too monotonous, published in the * Daily News' of a recent date, thinks it necessary to remind them and their mothers that young women with braina and energy to use them do get married. We hear, tco, on many Bides that the old dread which thirty years ago so greatly checked the progress of women's education has again revived, and that a wave of opinion ia warning mothers and young women that culture makea the latter too " formidable " to young men, and that " the clever ones" misa the most natural and moat fitting of women's careers They get appointments Bometimea, tut they never get proposals. We believe that the facta are misrepresented, and that the fear, which if well founded would rightly check education, ia almost entirely without foundation. Having watched the movement in favor of female education from the beginning with entire impartiality—that ia, with a keen dislike for the "advanced " women who want, an Mr Frederick Harrison says, to be "abortive men," to vote, and to ride astraddle, and to discuss •TheKreutzer Sonata,' and a strong sympathy for the women who desire culture, and gainful work, and control of their own money—we think we may say confidently that to the latter their grand profession, marriage, ia in no way debarred. Attractions for attractions, they are courted just as much aa their foolish sisters. They are flirted with less, partly because very young men demand in those they flirt with a certain amount of silliness, ao that in flirting there may be no demand upon the Intellect, and partly beoause of a fault of manner of which we speak below ; but they receive justaß many serious proposals. The men who can marry, and who nowadays are usually thirty-three—a social misfortune, owing mainly to the late period at which the successful now retire from active life—are men of a certain experience, and by no means fools. They are attracted by good looks, whether in the foolish or the wise virgins, and are carried away by unusual beauty, aa they were in the days of Helen, and will be when tho world cool*; but they are quite conscious of the advantage possessed by the sensible and the cultivated. They know what terrible borea ignorant girla can be—we do not mean by "ignorance" mere want of familiarity with learning—how utterly unreasonable they often are, and how much more liable they are in middle life to grow acrid, anappisb, or poaifcively ill-tempered. There ia no one bo perverse as the woman without intellectual interests whose situation happens to be at variance with her ideas of comfort, or who, being comfortable, ia conscious of the fain contempt, or, rather, slight avoidance of those around her. Women are perfectly well aware when men listen from politeness alone, and those among them to whom that lot falls grow aa bitter as some disappointed spinsters. The men of thirty-three know parfectly well how great a part friendship plays in married life, how it deepens affecr tion, and how difficult it is to feel friendship for a woman whose early charm has passed, who does not nnderatand one word in six you say, and who can neither sympathise with failure nor understand why you have succeeded. Camaraderie, one of the most delightful of all the bonds of union, ia impossible between the able and the silly. The men. too, are aware that it ia the cleyer girls, not the simpletons, who are free from the senseless extravagance which is perhaps, of all the foibleß which are not exactly vices, the most permanently irritating in wivea. That thing, at least, culture has elope for the majority of cultured women it has taught them how to coont. Here and there perhaps may be found the Nina of Mr N orris's clever Btory ' Matrimony'— the competent and cultured woman, to whose Belfishness expenditure seems a necessity, and who is only not extravagant when she has six thousand » year; who will plunder her father without remorse, and keep her mother without a shilling; but the immense majority of cultivated girls are economical. Frugality ia their road to independence. They could not live their lives if they oost their fathera too much, and they'learn to know the value of pounds, to avoid debt with horror, and to see that discount ia allowed them if they pay ready money. They are not, perhaps, devoted to " housekeeping, aa some of the unlettered are, meaning, three times out of five, endless and harassing interference with their servants; but they oan keep house, when they know their incomes, at an outlay well within them. The men understand that by a kind of instinct, our system of courtship allowing little chanoe of real knowledge—the American system does, and the Canadian—and they know, too, another thing which appeals still more direotly to their Bell-love. They know what it ia to be bored. There n no bore on earth equal to the woman who can neither talk nor Haten, who baa no mental interests iu common with her husband, who thinks hU friends B&tirical because they attend to her with a faint aenae of amused amazament, and who gathew rbund her all women except thoie whoae intelligence relieves life of its monotony and sense of attain.— * Spectator.'