As Many Men As There Are Around Her, So Many Knights Has Such A One, Ready Bucklered For Her Service, Should Occasion Require Such Services. Should It Not, She Passes On Unmolested - But Not, As She Herself Will Wrongly Think, Unheeded.

But as to her of whom I am speaking, we may say that every twist of her body and every tone of her voice is an unsuccessful falsehood.

She looks square at you in the face, and you rise to give her your seat. You rise from a deference to your own old convictions, and from that courtesy which you have ever paid to a woman's dress, let it be worn with ever such hideous deformities. She takes the place from which you have moved without a word or a bow. She twists herself round, banging your shins with her wires, while her chin is still raised, and her face is still flattened, and she directs her friend's attention to another seated man, as though that place were also vacant, and necessarily at her disposure. Perhaps the man opposite has his own ideas about chivalry. I have seen such a thing, and have rejoiced to see it.

You will meet these women daily, hourly, everywhere in the streets. Now and again you will find them in society, making themselves even more odious there than elsewhere. Who they are, whence they come, and why they are so unlike that other race of women of which I have spoken, you will settle for yourself. Do we not all say of our chance acquaintances, after half an hour's conversation, nay, after half an hour spent in the same room without conversation, that this woman is a lady, and that that other woman is not? They jostle each other even among us, but never seem to mix. They are closely allied; but neither imbues the other with her attributes. Both shall be equally well born, or both shall be equally ill born; but still it is so. The contrast exists in England; but in America it is much stronger. In England women become ladylike or vulgar. In the States they are either charming or odious.

See that female walking down Broadway. She is not exactly such a one as her I have attempted to describe on her entrance into the street car; for this lady is well dressed, if fine clothes will make well dressing. The machinery of her hoops is not battered, and altogether she is a personage much more distinguished in all her expenditures. But yet she is a copy of the other woman. Look at the train which she drags behind her over the dirty pavement, where dogs have been, and chewers of tobacco, and everything concerned with filth except a scavenger. At every hundred yards some unhappy man treads upon the silken swab which she trails behind her - loosening it dreadfully at the girth one would say; and then see the style of face and the expression of features with which she accepts the sinner's half muttered apology.

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