Evening star., 1894-12-15
THE ENGAGED GIRL,
How Society Insists on Placing Her in
u False Position.


From the Philadelphia Press.
"She should be labeled, Lass. with care /"
says the would-be-funny gnat in "Alice In
Wonderland" He might have been speak
Ing of the engaged girl instead of Alice. so
appropriately does the phrase fit into the
common notions regarding her. Usually to
echo Bunthornes wall, 80, hollow, hollow!"
over our social conventions is to give bat
tie to windmills powerful enough to blow
Don Quixote, horse, lance, armor and all,
up into the air, never to come down again
yet when 1 look on the engagement as 1t
is popularity understood, then remember
that we still have some happy marriages,
l find the strongest proof of a divinity that
shapes our ends, repairs or blunders. and
holds back our misguided feet from the
pit we are wildly anxious to struggle into.
Else what would ever become of the en-
gagged girl. ana that essential but minor
adjunct to the mise en- scene, the engaged
man?
From the moment the ring is seen spark
ling on her hand, the "fortunate-unhappy'
damsel, the object of her juniors admira-
ton, her sisters cynicism and her contem-
poraries' blended pity and envy, is cribbed,
cabined and confined in set of petty re-
strictions, survivals of the unfittest part
of barbarism, II we only knew 1t. Long
ago, when life was with beautiful SIM
plicity divided equally between fighting and
courting public opinion naively assumed
social intercourse between the two sexes
to have but one end-that of love-makng.
The idea, or it's remnant, lasts today under
widely different social conditions; conse-
quently Juliet, from the day she is labeled
'F'iancee Please Do Not Handle is not
expected to dance with other men, to re-
ceive them as callers or to accept reason
able attentions from them.
So far from mixing with other people
in society, and thus gaining valuable side
lights on one anotherS characters, the
dead to- the-world" young woman and her
young man illustrates La SALES witty say
ing that Love is an egotism of two" by
giving up their evenings to an unlimited
solitude a deux, which in brief engage
ment is only to be expected, but in a long
one frequently becomes a perfunctory tie
under which Romeo chafes, as in the case
of the young man Who broke his engage
ment because "she treated him like serv-
ant-girl-gave him only his Thursdays and
every other Sunday off,
To the vexed question Of long engage
ments Mr.. Augustine Birrell contributes a
suggestion in his mild observation that
"Of all the wrongs women suffer at the
hands Of men that Of not marrying them
Is the one they say should find 1t easiest
to forgive" This, a new and neat varia-
ton on the pins which "have saved a great
many lives by not being swallowed" I"
answers the common objection to the pro-
tracted betrothal. The matter is self -regu-
lating; would not the man who kept a
girl waiting a year. month or day longer
than was necessary be a still worse invest
ment as husband than as fiance? 1t may
paradoxically be said that her loss is her
eternal gain.
The same may be said Of the much
croaked-over modern tendency to break
engagements which I'm older times would
have been carried out to the bitter-often
very bitter-end. People get considerably
muddled in talking Of the sacredness of
the marriage tie and that of the engage
ment tie in the same breath They
haven't the slightest connection. An en-
gagement is not, as many people seem to
think a mere conventional delay to satisfy
propreties and get the trousseaux ready,
but a probation during which Romeo and
Juliet test the strength of their affection
before what Rudyard Kipling grimly calls
"the g-as-ye-both-shall-live curse from
the altar rails yokes them into a plow,
from which there is no looking back.
Society has nothing to lose, save possibly
a pretty spectacle and a slice of bride
cake, that it should so acrimoniously OBJ
ject to peoples pleasing themselves in a
matter that only concerns themselves; in
deed, they must do so II 1t is to give the
marriages at which 1t assists by its pres
ence even the brief guarantee Of the cheap
jeweler, whose stock 1 once saw labeled
with unconscious sarcasm:
wedding rings, 25 cents-warranted one
year."