'Well, our trouble in America is that we're being school-marmed to
death. You can see it in any paper you pick up. What were those men
talking about just now?'
'Food adulteration, police-reform, and beautifying waste-lots in towns,'
I replied promptly.
She threw up her hands. 'I knew it!' she cried. 'Our great National
Policy of co-educational housekeeping! Ham-frills and pillow-shams. Did
you ever know a man get a woman's respect by parading around creation
with a dish-clout pinned to his coat-tails?'
'But if his woman ord - - told him to do it?' I suggested.
'Then she'd despise him the more for doing it. You needn't laugh.
'You're coming to the same sort of thing in England.'
I returned to the little gathering. A woman was talking to them as one
accustomed to talk from birth. They listened with the rigid attention of
men early trained to listen to, but not to talk with, women. She was, to
put it mildly, the mother of all she-bores, but when she moved on, no
man ventured to say as much.
'That's what I mean by being school-manned to death,' said my
acquaintance wickedly. 'Why, she bored 'em stiff; but they are so well
brought up, they didn't even know they were bored. Some day the American
Man is going to revolt.'
'And what'll the American Woman do?'
'She'll sit and cry - and it'll do her good.'
Later on, I met a woman from a certain Western State seeing God's great,
happy, inattentive world for the first time, and rather distressed that
it was not like hers.
