XXVII.
A Few Types.
Woman is ever and always an interesting
subject to study; her phases are so innumer-
able, her types so varied.
Even when she is aggravating, she is interesting.
There is the woman who seems never to be at
home. Wherever you go she is there, and you hear
of her when you are not there.
Hers is the first face you encounter when enter-
ing reception rooms, and she greets you before you
have time to speak to your hostess.
You see her at all the first nights, and she awaits
your coming at all the art exhibitions.
Your friend met her in the Astoria tea-room, and
on that afternoon your sister found her in the piano
warerooms while pricing instruments.
She seems to be always shopping where you are;
yet you hear of her at the same time in several
other places frequented by mutual acquaintances.
She is as inevitable as destiny.
Another type of woman is the one who must be a
performer, never an observer, to find any pleasure
in life.
However well others may talk, she is in agony if
obliged to listen in silence. However stirring and
sublime music may be, she is bored to be merely
one of its auditors. If the music is a prelude to
something she is to do, if it introduces her as a
singer, speaker or performer, she can appreciate it,
but not otherwise. Nothing in the universe pos-
sesses any value to her, save as it relates to herself
and is subservient to her.
She adores the Creator only because He made her.
The absent-minded woman is another type. She
asks you a question with a great show of interest in
her face, but before you have completed a reply her
mind has wandered. You know it by a dazed look
in her eye and the fading of interest from her expres-
sion. You are obliged to elaborate your remarks
before calling back her vagrant thoughts to the
subject she introduced.
She may be looking you squarely in the eyes all
the time and making slight ejaculations of seeming
interest while you speak, but her mind is not there
and she is not listening to you.
There is no sensation more discouraging unless it
is attempting to sit upon a chair which has been
removed without your knowledge. In either case,
it is a painful jolt against vacuity.
Then there is a variety of queer, weird people--
the woman who makes her lips move while she lis-
tens to you, as if she were whispering the words you
say over after you, and another who supplies a word
or phrase for you every time you pause in conver-
sation; and the one who takes a mental inventory
of all the furniture in the room while you talk to
her, and looks everywhere save at you; and the one
who asks you questions only that she may interrupt
you in the middle of your response.
Every-day thoughts in prose and verse. by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Chicago: W. B. Conkey Company, 1901.
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