Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1907-02-19
HOW THE ENGLISH LIVE
FRENCH woMAN's VIEW OF
NEIaHBoRs HABITS.

A. T.. In London Express.
One has always heard that the English
take their pleasures sadly. but the few
months that I have spent this summer in
your country have forced on my mind the
conviction that your whole life is quite
unnecessarily sad and serious. Naturally,
as a woman, I have seen things from a
woman's point Of view, and I am certain
that no French woman can possibly be-
come intimate with the life Of the English
without feeling overwhelming sympathy for
the dullness of the lives led by women on
your side of the channel
In writing this I am not thinking of per-
sons whose income is slender and whose
whole time is necessarily devoted to the
business of fighting poverty. In all coun-
tries, unhappily, the life of the poor is
filled with cares and possesses little variety
or color.
But l am for the moment concerned
with the men and women of your we'll
to-do classes, your lawyers, your doctors,
your merchants. whose incomes are GER
tainly much in excess of the incomes
France. and 1t is the wives and daughters
of these men whose fate 1 have come to
commiserate
The one absorbing interest of life to your
men Is the making of money. In most Of
the families with whom have stayed-and
my experience has been varied and extern
sfve-the man leaves home for his Office
or his chambers early in the morning and
returns In the evening just in time to dress
for dinner.
Dull and Alone.
All day long your women are alone, more
alone than the women Of any other nation
In the world more alone than women have
ever been since the days when the knight
spent most of his time fighting Saracens
In Palestine. leaving his lady safely locked
up in his ancestral castle.
Your women. I must admit, accept their
loneliness with stoical and almost eastern
resignation. They tacitIy approve of the
wild money-making of their husbands, and
they spend their days In paying visits to
acquaintances whom they more often than
not dislike, or In buying things that they
do not in the least want.
1t Is curious to note that the English
mans feverish desire to add to his income
Is largely due to the fact that his wife's
expenses become greater and greater as
time goes on, while, on the other hand,
THESE expenses are usually absurdly I'M
necessary and are in their turn the result
OF Woman's loneliness and the fact that her
life Is SO completely divorced from her hus-
bands.
The consequence of this strange life is
that each evening sees your men weary
and your women bored. The very appear
ance Of your people is, indeed evidence of
their lives. The men, with their strained.
eager faces, betokenng the never-ceasing
anxiety Of the battle of life. The women
passing from one silly fashion to another,
aping "fastness,'' which is really entirely
alien to the English character, and finally
arriving at the two most unfeminne vices
of gambling and drinking, which French
women, whatever may be their faults are
never addicted to, and which, 1 am GER
tain, in England are merely the attempts
to escape from soul-paralyzng solitude.
Sport as Divider.
1t is not, indeed, only business and
money making that separate husbands and
wives in England. Your devotion to sport
is another contributory cause In one fam
lily in which I stayed for some weeks this
season the husband was continually at his
Office from Monday morning till lunch time
on Saturday, and on Saturday afternoon he
invariably started for his golf club Sleep
ing In the club house on Saturday night,
and generally on Sunday night also, and
not appearing at home again until dinner
time on Monday.
His wife realized that exercise was nee
essary at week-ends if the high pressure
of the other five days was to be kept up.
The poor man, indeed, had ceased to be a
man at all, and had become mere money
making machine, spending his whole life
earning money for his wife to spend, when
they both would have been far happier and
far more human with half the income and
with some time left for the real pleasures
of life.
For if your women are dull, to a for
eigner your men are still duller. They can
talk of the money market and of politics
as far as they affect stock exchange prices,
and they can supply one with uninteligible
sporting records. But conversation as we
understand it in France does not exist
with You.
In France.
Frenchman carefully acquires the art
OF pleasing and amusing women. With us