The Savannah morning news., 1901-04-07
WOMAN'S
WORLD.

customs that they offer very little food
TO the observer of national Characters
tics The men follow the London fash
ions, the women the Paris ones; they all
cultivate sport, art and literature; they
ali enjoy the same luxuries of life. they
all have good cooks, they all have dis
covered the same way of living.
If you want to see how differently peo-
pie live in France, in England, in Ger
many, in Italy, in America, wherever you
like, live among the middle and lower
classes. One day, in South Africa, spent
whole day in Zulu kraal, living with
the natives and like the natives, and 1
found that day spent in a more interesting
manner than if I had spent it among the
hosts of the Faubourg Saint-Germain,
Mayfair or Fifth avenue.
France is the only country that know
where. outside of the aristocracy and the
wealthy classes, you can find people who
live daintily. The French laborer eats
more appetizing dinner than English
and German well-to-do shopkeepers eat
and than is served in the hotels of the
small American towns. That French Ia
borer would refuse to swallow and even
d
have seen English workingmen eat at
noon, when resting their backs against
wall or a fence on the roadside-bread
and pickles, or a slice of something look
ing very much like cats meat, and stale
beer that had been stewing for hours in
the sun in a badly corked can.
The French wife, immensely superior
to her husband in intelligence, in shrewd-
ness, in savoir-vivre and sayoir-faire,
thanks to her common sense, her knowl-
edge of financial matters, her instinct for
good order and management, her artistic
refinement, her keen power of observa-
ton, her native adaptability, her talent
for cookery, makes husband enjoying
but a small income lead the life that
rich foreigner might envy.
She may have two dresses and one hat
only to her name but by constant skilful
changes the little humbug will make you
believe that she possesses a well-furnish-
ed wardrobe. 1t is not the cassock that
makes the monk, any more than it is the
dress that makes the woman. A woman
is stylish or not according to the manner
in which she puts on her clothes, and
that is where the French woman is inim-
liable. To lift her dress modestly grace
fully and daintily as she crosses mud
dy street, she has not her equal in the
world. She has a little bustling, fatter-
ing way about her that will always keep
your interest in her alive. She is always
tidy and smart, her hair we'll dressed,
her hands well gloved, her stockings well
drawn and her dainty little feet well shod.
When she speaks to you, you can seldom
guess, from the way she is dressed, from
the way she behaves from the language
she uses, whether she is the wife of what
society calls a gentleman or not.
She has the knack, the Unborn genius,
for getting twenty sou worth out of every
ha
does not play at "at homes" and saves
her tea and sugar, which, in France, are
expensive Injuries; she does not play the
piano and saves her husbands ears; she
makes her own frocks and saves her
dressmakers' bills; she eats light, healthy
meals of her own make and saves cooks
wages; she goes to bed early and saves
her candles. She is rich, as most of us
might be, not in what she actually pos
sesses, but in what she knows how to do
without. Thanks to that woman a
Frenchman who has $500 to spend in the
year lives like an Englishman or any
American who has an income of 5000.
In the most modern little fiat she has
her dressing room, out of which she is
sues in the morning neatly trimmed, a
perfect transformation. She will do with
out drawing room, but never without a
dressing room, for she understands to a
supreme degree that poetry of matri-
mony which has not two years to live
If che apartments does not possess a
dressing room.
Silly nonsense, some people will say.
Well my dear friend, let me tell you
that happiness is made up of thousands
of little foolish trifies of that sort.
The womanly woman is predestined to
be a joy forever. She is the endless chain
attaching and keeping cp communication
ri nd TQu of
this contract woman is fated to live for
ever and survive all vicissitudes. She
adapts herself to times and conditions
with consummate skill and the ability of
manifest destiny. She is all things to all
men, in all places, and in all times.
To definitely fix and classify the wo-
manly woman, says the Record Herald of
Chicago, is even more difficult than to de
termine the manly man. Circumstances
require different qualities and times pro-
duce different needs. The womanly wo-
man will always do the needful acts and
perform the duties which. rightly belong
to her. One of the needful acts, and like
wise duty, pressing upon woman in this
age, is to make and keep herself in uni
son with the age.
1t is distinctly not womanly, but on the
contrary childish, for adults of the fem
mime gender in these days to prate of
their helplessness and cling to the old
prerogatives which belong to dependent
women hundreds of years ago, and at the
same time boldly embrace every oppor-
tUnity of freedom and privilege which the
twentieth century offers to womanhood.
It is distinctly puerile to expect to eat
cur cake and have it, too, and the soon
er right-minded, logical consistency is eX-
pected of the womanly woman the sooner
we will have arrived at a standard OF
definition and classification which will fix
the womanly woman and break away all
the confusion which now pertains as to
her exact characteristics
In the long past woman has allowed 50
much to be assumed (unchalenged) con-
corning her ways, and has yielded to SO
many conditions, that it has become a
fixed idea in some minds that woman
must have been wound up at creation to
90 such and such things and incapable OF
doing any others.
One would suppose man and woman In
the garden of Eden entered into solemn
contract or covenant to do such and such
things only, and that man had kept his
part OF the contract manfully, but that
woman had surreptitiously evaded, and
was row trying 10 break away wholly
from her part of that contract
Rest assured the womanly woman Is
very much alive in this age. She Is not
mapping. as were her ancestors. The toe
49, l. -. -