In our days chivalry includes compassion for animals too.  I have never read of a more gallant soldier than that colonel who, as related in Our Animal Friends (May, 1899), while riding in a Western desert at the head of five hundred horsemen, suddenly made a slight detour—­which all the men had to follow—­because in the direct path a meadow lark was sitting on her nest, her soft brown eyes turned upward, watching, wondering, fearing.  It was a nobler deed than many of the most gallant actions in battle, for these are often done from selfish motives—­ambition, the hope of promotion—­while this deed was the outcome of pure unselfish sympathy.

“Five hundred horses had been turned aside, and five hundred men, as they bent over the defenceless mother and her brood, received a lesson in that broad humanity which is the essence of higher life.”

To this day there are plenty of ruffians—­many of them in fine clothes—­who are strangers to chivalrous feelings toward defenceless women or animals—­men who behave as gentlemen only under compulsion of public opinion.  The encouraging thing is that public opinion has taken so strong a stand in favor of women; that it has written Place aux Dames on its shield in such large letters.  While the red American squaw shared with the dogs the bones left by her contemptuous ungallant husband, the white American woman is served first at table and gets the choicest morsels; she receives the window-seat in the cars, the lower berth in the sleeper; she has precedence in society and wherever she is in her proper place; and when a ship is about to sink, the captain, if necessary (which is seldom the case), stands with drawn revolver prepared to shoot any man who would ungallantly get into a boat before all the women are saved.

“AN INSULT TO WOMAN”

This change from the primitive selfishness described in the preceding pages, this voluntary yielding by man of the place of honor and of the right of the strongest, is little less than a miracle; it is the grandest triumph of civilization.  Yet there are viragoes who have had the indecency to call gallantry an “insult to woman.”  There is indeed a kind of gallantry—­the Ovidian—­which is an insult to women; but true masculine gallantry is woman’s chief glory and conquest, indicating the transformation of the savage’s scorn for woman’s physical weakness into courteous deference to her as the nobler, more virtuous and refined sex.  There are some selfish, sour, disappointed old maids, who, because of their lack of feminine traits, repel men and receive less than their share of gallant courtesy.  But that is their own fault.  Ninety-nine per cent. of all women have a happier lot to-day than at any previous time in history, and this change is due to the growth of the disinterested courtesy and sympathy known as gallantry.  At the same time the change is strikingly illustrated in the status of old maids themselves.  No one now despises an