KEEPING ABREAST OF THE TIMES

Anne O'Hagan

In Which It is Shown that Modem Life is Sometimes a Little Difficult for Women

HEODORA believes in keeping abreast of the times.

"We can't go backwards," she said. "We must push on, like brave soldiers, and do our share in the battle!"

We were in a popular cabaret tea-room and, obedient to the first sound of the snare-drum, she ceased her inspiring harangue, sprang to her feet, smiled a smile that seemed all blue eyes and affection, placed a tender hand within that of her eighteen-year-old son, and launched herself upon the current of the dance.

A thought came to me. Was this not the persistence of the stern Puritan spirit in the women of our race? Theodora, of course, looked strikingly unlike the Puritan matron of the Thanksgiving magazines; her skirt—emphatically in the singular—was liberal only in its revelation of outlines; her shoulders drooped in the most approved debutante fashion; she wore a head-piece which, in the smartest manner possible, deprived her entirely of one eye and threatened the optic ruin of all other dancers through the sinister operations of a projecting javelin of adornment. With considerable grace she proceeded through the steps of the hesitation waltz. With her semi-décolletage, her twice-slit skirt, and her black silk stockings, she might have seemed, to a careless onlooker, very unlike the voluminously-clad, psalm-reciting, Indian-fighting woman of our elder Puritan days. Yet the same spirit ruled her as once ruled her ancestress—a desperate determination to do her work, to conform to the standards of her circle, though she perished in conforming. Priscilla, the Puritan, called it "living unto the Lord," and uncomplainingly bore the hardships her zeal entailed upon her. Theodora called it "keeping abreast of the times," and, to her credit, no one has heard her lisp a syllable of protest against the exactions of her high vocation. The type persists, I meditated; the costumes change, but the spirit remains the same.

EXPOUNDING her creed to me, not long ago, Theodora said— not dogmatically, for she is never dogmatic, but a little wistfully and altogether charmingly: "I feel it a duty I owe my family and my friends, as well as myself, to keep up with the time."

Whereupon, with slim, eager fingers she drew from a brocade bag a roll of needlework and began busily to crochet a strip for a bedspread. Then she went on, "Yes, we live in a wonderful time. It would be criminal not to make the most of our opportunities. Don't you think that the movement for the revival of art in the domestic handicrafts is one of the great constructive movements of the day? Every woman does needlework like this, for instance, and every woman uses household utensils. Why should they not be beautiful, like Benvenuto Cellini, you know? Did you hear the lecture on 'Bringing Beauty Back' at the Colony Club—or was that the lecture at the Metropolitan Museum-?"

She broke off in evident distress at the vagueness of her recollections. I looked at her with a little alarm. Her lapses of memory were becoming more noticeable of late.

"The pace of your life is too quick," I said. "You are doing too much, altogether too much."

"One must," she said, wistfully, "if one wishes to keep up. Heavens! I'm due at the Pageant Committee of the Suffrage League at four. Goodbye."

TO THEODORA, when, after an hour or so, she returned from the pageant, I said, with benevolent intent:

"You are tired. You must rest. You attempt a great deal more than is right."

"Not half enough!" she cried with fervor, her delicate, eager face alight. "If the weeks and the days were twice as long as they are, I might catch up with my program. As it is, I can't tell you the number of things— improving things, useful things, vital things—that I'm obliged to forego!"

"Nonsense!" I said. "What have you foregone to-day?"

"Let me see what I've done," answered Theodora, consulting her engagement pad, "and I'll tell you what I haven't done.— Half past nine, take Carroll to doctor about adenoids-"

"Who on earth is Carroll and what concern of yours are his adenoids?"

"He's the cook's little boy, and he must have them out," answered Theodora, earnestly. "A dear little boy, but dull,—dull on account of his adenoids.—Nine forty-five, tango corset at Clothilde's. That was a fitting. Ten fifteen, the Efficiency Bureau —I was fifteen minutes late; Clothilde always keeps one waiting, but her corsets are wonderful—I feel as free as a Greek statue.— It's a wonderful work they're doing—the Bureau, not the corsets. It's effecting a union, you know, between hundreds of highly trained, splendid girls, and the kind of work they should be doing. I have given them nearly all my money for months and months.— Eleven, dancing class. I don't want to grow into one of those stiff, stodgy women—it isn't fair to one's husband.

"TRANCING," she went on earnestly, "is the expression of a primitive religious impulse; it's a bond between youth and age; you don't know how I love it," she added rosily, "when Harry, my boy, asks me to dance. He always does—and so do the boys in his class. Yes, it's a splendid link between parents and their children-"

"Yes, I know," I said. "What else did you forego?"

"Eleven thirty to one, 'With the New Books,' " read Theodora from her calendar. "No, it's not the same as the Current Events class. That meets on Thursdays. 'With the New Books' is a purely intellectual group of women. Did you know that Thackeray was desperately in love with Mrs. Brookfield?"

"Next," I entreated, evading comment on the purely intellectual tidings from the book club.

One thirty, committee luncheon of the leaders of the, league for the Economic Equality of Women. Two thirty, visiting hospital kitchens for ideas for our new hospital—I'm on that board, you know. Three thirty"—Theodora spoke apologetically—"I simply had to do some shopping. Four, rehearsal of the Charity Theatricals at the club—I'm the old-fashioned heroine; isn't it a joke? Fancy me old-fashioned! And now, at five, I'm home for a quiet hour with my children and my friends. To-night we are dining at the Ritz with a Western manufacturer who wants Alfred—" (Alfred is Mr. Theodora) "to construct a model, fireproof, mill village for him; I'm looking out for the sanitary and hygienic conditions of the houses myself. After dinner, the theatre,—a trafficin-souls play, very powerful and stimulating, I hear. Then supper, a dance at Sherry's, and to bed."

"But this," I pointed out to her, "is a record of what you have done, not of what you have missed."

"OH, BUT I gave up a lot, too. A morning talk on 'What Every Child Should Know,' by Theresa Tellingham; she's one of the bird-and-the-bee, the seed-and-the-pollen school,—And the meeting of the Stage Society—or was it the Drama League? They were to have a speech by a wonderful college professor on 'The Drama of Sweden.' : I missed that and I also missed my First-Aid Class. Of course I know that First-Aid went out years ago, but truly," she raised pathetic eyes to mine, "ever since we knocked down that little child in South Lee last fall, I never wanted to go in the car until I understood something of accident emergency work.-Then I missed my sculpture class. Oh, yes, I'm taking modeling. I haven't any great talent, but our teacher is so poor and deserving, and I like to help out where I can. And a meeting of the shirtwaist makers' un-" Theodora suddenly leaned back in her chair. She looked a little pale. steadily as she fumbled for a bottle of aromatic ammonia in readiness beside the tea-kettle. "Aren't the opportunities of our times for women really wonderful and inspiring?" she whispered faintly.

(Cont. on page 96)

(Continued from page 33)

THE other day when I visited Theodora in the I hospital where she is slowly convalescing from a somewhat lengthy attack of nerves and fever, she greeted me with the ghost of her old-time smile.

"I'm getting some wonderful material here for our hospital kitchen committee," she said in faint but enthusiastic tones. "And I think I shall have the appendix operation after all. I have to stay here two months anyway, and it seems a pity to waste such a wonderful opportunity. If I have it done now, I shan't be interrupted in my really busy and inspiring season. I don't want to get behind, you know."

I could think of nothing at all adequate to say.

Her blue eyes clouded faintly as she looked out through the windows toward the strip of city sky. The breath fluttered a little on her pale lips. "Sometimes," she confessed, "I think that I am not the proper instrument to undertake it all—too weak 'to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire' and—you know—remodel it—what did Omar say—though Omar has gone out lately, hasn't he ?—Masefield and Noyes, and—I forget the others—are in now, aren't they? But you know what he said, Omar, I mean, about remaking the world 'nearer to the heart's desire/ Sometimes I think I mayn't be able to do it all. But that's merely physical weakness speaking; I won't let myself harbor such cowardly thoughts! We live," she asserted gallantly, "in wonderful times, and I mean to keep abreast of them."

At this point the nurse came into the room, gave Theodora her dose of strychnine, and sent me home.