PRETTY SIMPLETONS.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXIV, Issue 1868, 3 February 1892, Page 5

PRETTY SIMPLETONS.

We had thought that the cult of the pretty simpleton had died away, like the cult of "sensibility" which distinguished Miss 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 girls 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 brains and energy to use them do get married. We hear, too, on many sides 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 is warning mothers and young women that culture makes the latter too " formidable " to young men, and that " the clever ones " miss the most natural and most fitting of women's careers. They get appointments sometimes, but they never get proposals. We believe that the facts are misrepresented, and that the fear, which if well founded would rightly check education, is almost entirely without foundation. Having watched the movement in favor of female education from the beginning with entire impartiality — that is, with a keen dislike for the " advanced " women who want, aa Mr Frederick Harrison says, to be "abortive men," to vote, and to ride astraddle, and to discuss ' The Kreutzer Sonata,' and a Btrong 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, is in no way debarred. Attractions for attractions, they are courted just as much as their foolish sisters. They are flirted with less, partly because very young men demand in those they flirt with a certain amount of silliness, so that in flirting there may be no demand upon the intellect, and partly because of a fault of manner of which we speak below ; but they receive just as 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, as they were in the days of Helen, and will be when the world cools ; but they are quite conscious of the advantage possessed by the sensible and the cultivated. They know what terrible bores ignorant girls 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 iD middle life to grow acrid, snappish, or positively ill-tempered. There is no one so perverse as the woman without intellectual interests whose situation happens to be at variance with her ideas of comfort, or who, being comfortable, is 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 as bitter aB some disappointed spinsters. The men of thirty-three know psrfectly well how great a part friendship plays in married life, how it deepens affection, and how difficult it is to feel friendship for a woman whose eafrly charm has passed, who does not understand one word in six you Bay, 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, is impossible between the able and the Billy, The men, too, are aware that it is the clever girls, not the simpletons, who are free from the senseless extravagance which is perhaps, of all the foibles which are not exactly vices, the most permanently irritating in wives. That thing, at least, culture has done for the majority of cultured women — it has taught them how to count. Here and there perhaps may be found the Nina of Mr Norria's clever story ' Matrimony ' — the competent and cultured woman, to whoae selfishness expenditure seems a necessity, and who is only not extravagant when she has six thousand a 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 is their road to independence. They could not live their lives if they cost their fathers too much, and they learn to know the value of pounds, to avoid debt with horror, and to see that discount is allowed them if they pay ready money. They are not, perhaps, devoted to "housekeeping, as some of the unlettered are, meaning, three times out of five, endless and harassing interference with their servants ; but they can 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 chance of real knowledge — the American system does, and the Canadian — and they know, too, another thing which appeals still more directly to their self-love. They know what it is to be bored. There is no bore on earth equal to the woman who can neither talk nor listen, who has no mental interests in common with her husband, who thinks his friends satirical because they attend to her with a faint sense of amused amazement, and who gathers round her all women except those whoae intelligence relieves life of its monotony and sense of Btrain. — 'Spectator.'