I pride myself on being a man of the world—­in the better sense of the phrase.  I feel no regret over the passing of those romantic days when maidens swooned at the sight of a drop of blood or took refuge in the “vapors” at the approach of a strange young man; in point of fact I do not believe they ever did.  I imagine that our popular idea of the fragility and sensitiveness of the weaker sex, based on the accounts of novelists of the eighteenth century, is largely a literary convention.

Heroines were endowed, as a matter of course, with the possession of all the female virtues, intensified to such a degree that they were covered with burning blushes most of the time.  Languor, hysteria and general debility were regarded as the outward indications of a sweet and gentle character.  Woman was a tendril clinging to the strong oak of masculinity.  Modesty was her cardinal virtue.  One is, of course, entitled to speculate on the probable contemporary causes for the seeming overemphasis placed on this admirable characteristic.  Perhaps feminine honesty was so rare as to be at a premium and modesty was a sort of electric sign of virtue.

I am not squeamish.  I have always let my children read what they would.  I have never made a mystery of the relations of the sexes, for I know the call of the unseen—­the fascination lent by concealment, of discovery.  I believe frankness to be a good thing.  A mind that is startled or shocked by the exposure of an ankle or the sight of a stocking must be essentially impure.  Nor do I quarrel with woman’s natural desire to adorn herself for the allurement of man.  That is as inevitable as springtime.

But unquestionably the general tone of social intercourse in America, at least in fashionable centers, has recently undergone a marked and striking change.  The athletic girl of the last twenty years, the girl who invited tan and freckles, wielded the tennis bat in the morning and lay basking in a bathing suit on the sand at noon, is gradually giving way to an entirely different type—­a type modeled, it would seem, at least so far as dress and outward characteristics are concerned, on the French demimondaine.  There are plenty of athletic girls to be found on the golf links and tennis courts; but a growing and large minority of maidens at the present time are too chary of their complexions to brave the sun.  Big hats, cloudlike veils, high heels, paint and powder mark the passing of the vain hope that woman can attract the male sex by virtue of her eugenic possibilities alone.

It is but another and unpleasantly suggestive indication that the simplicity of an older generation—­the rugged virtue of a more frugal time—­has given place to the sophistication of the Continent.  When I was a lad, going abroad was a rare and costly privilege.  A youth who had been to Rome, London and Paris, and had the unusual opportunity of studying the treasures of the Vatican, the Louvre and the National Gallery, was regarded with envy.  Americans went abroad for culture; to study the glories of the past.