She emerges from the shop. She is any woman, and the shop from which she emerges is any shop in any town. She has been shopping. This does not imply that she has been buying anything or that she has contemplated buying anything, but merely that she has been shopping—a very different pursuit from buying. Buying implies business for the shop; shopping merely implies business for the sales person.
She emerges out of the shop. In the doorway she runs into a woman of her acquaintance. If she likes the other woman she is cordial. But if she does not like her she is very, very cordial. Why should this be? I cannot answer. It is not given for us to know.
She meets another woman at the door. They stop for conversation. Two men meeting under the same condition would mechanically draw away a few paces, out of the route of people passing in or out of the shop. But this woman and her acquaintance take root right there. Persons dodge round them and glare at them. Others bump into them, and are glared at by the two traffic blockers. Where they stand they make a knot of confusion.
But does it occur to either of them to suggest that they might step aside, five feet or ten, and save themselves, and the pedestrians, some delay and considerable annoyance? It does not. It never will.
Women do wear maniacal garments sometimes; that there is no denying. But on the other hand styles for women change with such frequency. Nothing I can think of gets old-fashioned with such rapidity as a feminine fashion. If this season a woman’s skirt is so scantily fashioned that as she hobbles along she has the appearance of being leg-shackled, it is as sure as saying that, next season, she will have leapt to the other extreme and her draperies will be more than amply voluminous. About once in so often she is found wearing a mode which combines beauty with saneness but that often is not very often.
Occasionally she is found elsewhere but it is only in the Metros of the world, the cities where so many of the young women are prematurely old and so many of the old women are prematurely young. This woman is waging that battle against the mounting birthdays which nobody ever yet won. Her hair has been dyed in those rich autumnal tints, she glistens with diamonds until she makes you think of the ice coming out of the Nubra River in the early spring. But about her complexion, it is a climate-proof shellac. Her eyebrows are the self-made kind, and her lips done by hand. Her skirt is too short for looks and too tight for comfort; she is tightly prisoned at the waistline and not sufficiently confined in the bust. There is nothing natural or rational anywhere about her. She is as artificial as a tin minnow and she glitters like one.
But apart form all this, women have the most transcendental and most admirable of virtues. Women can give, give and give of all they have, worth having. They give their wonderful mercy and their wonderful patience,and yet their wonderful courage, they give their time and their energies and their talent.When the country asks of them, they give their sons, their brothers, their husbands and their fathers.We cannot conceive of men going so far and doing so much, but the women, you know how women are!
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