unselfish woman simply because she prefers to remain single; but formerly old maids were looked on nearly everywhere with a contempt that reached its climax among the Southern Slavs, who, according to Krauss (Ploss, II., 491), treated them no better than mangy dogs.  No one associated with them; they were not tolerated in the spinning-room or at the dances; they were ridiculed and derided; were, in short, regarded as a disgrace to the family.

SUMMARY

To sum up:  among the lower races man habitually despises and maltreats woman, looking on her as a being made, not for her own sake, but for his comfort and pleasure.  Gallantry is unknown.  The Australian who fights for his family shows courage, not gallantry, for he is simply protecting his private property, and does not otherwise show the slightest regard for his women.  Nor does the early custom of serving for a wife imply gallantry; for here the suitor serves the parents, not the maid; he simply adopts a primitive way of paying for a bride.  Sparing women in battle for the purpose of making concubines or slaves of them is not gallantry.  One might as well call a farmer gallant because, when he kills the young roosters for broilers, he saves the young hens.  He lets these live because he needs eggs.  The motive in both cases is utilitarian and selfish.  Ovidian gallantry does not deserve such a name, because it is nothing but false flattery for the selfish purpose of beguiling foolish women.  Arabic flatteries are of a superior order because sincere at the time being and addressed to girls whom the flatterer desires to marry.  But this gallantry, too, is only skin deep.  Its motives are sensual and selfish, for as soon as the girl’s physical charm begins to fade she is contemptuously discarded.

Our modern gallantry toward women differs radically from all those attitudes in being unselfish.  It is synonymous with true chivalry—­disinterested devotion to those who, while physically weaker, are considered superior morally and esthetically.  It treats all women with polite deference, and does so not because of a vow or a code, but because of the natural promptings of a kind, sympathetic disposition.  It treats a woman not as a toper does a whiskey bottle, applying it to his lips as long as it can intoxicate him with pleasure and then throwing it away, but cherishes her for supersensual attributes that survive the ravages of time.  To a lover, in particular, such gallantry is not a duty, but a natural impulse.  He lies awake nights devising plans for pleasing the object of his devotion.  His gallantry is an impulse to sacrifice himself for the beloved—­an instinct so inbred by generations of practice that now even a child may manifest it.  I remember how, when I was six or seven years old, I once ran out the school-house during recess to pick up some Missouri hailstones, while others, large as marbles, were falling about me, threatening to smash my skull.  I gave the trophies to a dark-eyed girl of my age—­not with a view to any possible reward, but simply because I loved her more than all the other girls combined and wanted to please her.