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Page 77
"Opportunities should be made," replied Carley.
"There are a million sides to this question of the modern young woman--the
fin-de-siecle girl. I'm for her!"
"How about the extreme of style in dress for this remarkably-to-be-pitied
American girl you champion so eloquently?" queried Carley, sarcastically.
"Immoral!" exclaimed Eleanor with frank disgust.
"You admit it?"
"To my shame, I do."
"Why do women wear extreme clothes? Why do you and I wear open-work silk
stockings, skirts to our knees, gowns without sleeves or bodices?"
"We're slaves to fashion," replied Eleanor, "That's the popular excuse."
"Bah!" exclaimed Carley.
Eleanor laughed in spite of being half nettled. "Are you going to stop
wearing what all the other women wear--and be looked at askance? Are you
going to be dowdy and frumpy and old-fashioned?"
"No. But I'll never wear anything again that can be called immoral. I want
to be able to say why I wear a dress. You haven't answered my question yet.
Why do you wear what you frankly admit is disgusting?"
"I don't know, Carley," replied Eleanor, helplessly. "How you harp on
things! We must dress to make other women jealous and to attract men. To be
a sensation! Perhaps the word 'immoral' is not what I mean. A woman will be
shocking in her obsession to attract, but hardly more than that, if she
knows it."
"Ah! So few women realize how they actually do look. Haze Ruff could tell
them."
"Haze Ruff. Who in the world is he or she?" asked Eleanor.
"Haze Ruff is a he, all right," replied Carley, grimly.
"Well, who is he?"
"A sheep-dipper in Arizona," answered Carley, dreamily.
"Humph! And what can Mr. Ruff tell us?"
"He told me I looked like one of the devil's angels--and that I dressed to
knock the daylights out of men."
"Well, Carley Burch, if that isn't rich!" exclaimed Eleanor, with a peal of
laughter. "I dare say you appreciate that as an original compliment."
"No. . . . I wonder what Ruff would say about jazz--I just wonder,"
murmured Carley.
"Well, I wouldn't care what he said, and I don't care what you say,"
returned Eleanor. "The preachers and reformers and bishops and rabbis make
me sick. They rave about jazz. Jazz--the discordant note of our decadence!
Jazz--the harmonious expression of our musicless, mindless, soulless
materialism!--The idiots! If they could be women for a while they would
realize the error of their ways. But they will never, never abolish jazz--
never, for it is the grandest, the most wonderful, the most absolutely
necessary thing for women in this terrible age of smotheration."
"All right, Eleanor, we understand each other, even if we do not agree,"
said Carley. "You leave the future of women to chance, to life, to
materialism, not to their own conscious efforts. I want to leave it to free
will and idealism."
"Carley, you are getting a little beyond me," declared Eleanor, dubiously.
"What are you going to do? It all comes home to each individual woman. Her
attitude toward life."
"I'll drift along with the current, Carley, and be a good sport," replied
Eleanor, smiling.
"You don't care about the women and children of the future? You'll not deny
yourself now, and think and work, and suffer a little, in the interest of
future humanity?"
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