INTERESTING GIRLS

It seems hardly worth while to say that this would be a more interesting country if there were more interesting people in it.  But the remark is worth consideration in a land where things are so much estimated by what they cost.  It is a very expensive country, especially so in the matter of education, and one cannot but reflect whether the result is in proportion to the outlay.  It costs a great many thousands of dollars and over four years of time to produce a really good base-ball player, and the time and money invested in the production of a society young woman are not less.  No complaint is made of the cost of these schools of the higher education; the point is whether they produce interesting people.  Of course all women are interesting.  It has got pretty well noised about the world that American women are, on the whole, more interesting than any others.  This statement is not made boastfully, but simply as a market quotation, as one might say.  They are sought for; they rule high.  They have a “way”; they know how to be fascinating, to be agreeable; they unite freedom of manner with modesty of behavior; they are apt to have beauty, and if they have not, they know how to make others think they have.  Probably the Greek girls in their highest development under Phidias were never so attractive as the American girls of this period; and if we had a Phidias who could put their charms in marble, all the antique galleries would close up and go out of business.

But it must be understood that in regard to them, as to the dictionaries, it is necessary to “get the best.”  Not all women are equally interesting, and some of those on whom most educational money is lavished are the least so.  It can be said broadly that everybody is interesting up to a certain point.  There is no human being from whom the inquiring mind cannot learn something.  It is so with women.  Some are interesting for five minutes, some for ten, some for an hour; some are not exhausted in a whole day; and some (and this shows the signal leniency of Providence) are perennially entertaining, even in the presence of masculine stupidity.  Of course the radical trouble of this world is that there are not more people who are interesting comrades, day in and day out, for a lifetime.  It is greatly to the credit of American women that so many of them have this quality, and have developed it, unprotected, in free competition with all countries which have been pouring in women without the least duty laid upon their grace or beauty.  We, have a tariff upon knowledge—­we try to shut out all of that by a duty on books; we have a tariff on piety and intelligence in a duty on clergymen; we try to exclude art by a levy on it; but we have never excluded the raw material of beauty, and the result is that we can successfully compete in the markets of the world.