Once his daughter, who was sitting in the gallery, saw him entering the House _all alone_.
"Here comes my father with his party," she said.
I was greatly amused at the quiet reprimand given by a literary lady of New York to a stranger at her receptions, who, with hands crossed complacently under his coat-tails, was critically examining the various treasures in her room, humming obtrusively as he pa.s.sed along.
The hostess paused near him, surveyed him critically, and then inquired, in a gentle tone: "Do you play also?"
A young girl being asked why she had not been more frequently to Lenten services, excused herself in this fashion, severe, but truthful: "Oh, Dr. ---- is on such intimate terms with the Almighty that I felt _de trop_."
At a reception in Washington this spring an admirable answer was given by a level-headed woman--we are all proud of Miss Cleveland--to a fine-looking army officer, who has been doing guard duty in that magnificent city for the past seventeen years. "Pray," said he, "what do ladies find to think about besides dress and parties?"
"They can think of the heroic deeds of our modern army officers," was her smiling reply.
Do you remember Lydia Maria Child"s reply to her husband when he wished he was as rich as Croesus: "At any rate, you are King of Lydia;" and Lucretia Mott"s humorous comment when she entered a room where her husband and his brother Richard were sitting, both of them remarkable for their taciturnity and reticence: "I thought you must both be here--it was so still!"
In my own home I recall a sensible old maid of Scotch descent with her cosey cottage and the dear old-fashioned garden where she loved to work.
Our physician, a man of infinite humor, who honestly admired her sterling worth, and was attracted by her individuality, leaned over her fence one bright spring morning, with the direct question: "Miss Sharp, why did you never get married?"
She looked up from her weeding, rested on her hoe-handle, and looking steadily at his hair, which was of a sandy hue, answered: "I"ll tell you all about it, Doctor. I made up my mind, when I was a girl, that, come what would, I would never marry a red-headed man, and none but men with red hair have ever offered themselves."
We all know women whose capacity for monologue exhausts all around them.
So that the remark will be appreciated of a lady to whom I said, alluding to such a talker: "Have you seen Mrs. ---- lately?"
"No, I really had to give up her acquaintance in despair, for I had been trying two years to tell her something in particular."
A lady once told me she could always know when she had taken too much wine at dinner--her husband"s jokes began to seem funny!
Lastly and--_finally_, there is a reason for our apparent lack of humor, which it may seem ungracious to mention. Women do not find it politic to cultivate or express their wit. No man likes to have his story capped by a better and fresher from a lady"s lips. What woman does not risk being called sarcastic and hateful if she throws back the merry dart, or indulges in a little sharp-shooting? No, no, it"s dangerous--if not fatal.
"Though you"re bright, and though you"re pretty, They"ll not love you if you"re witty."
Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier are good ill.u.s.trations of this point. The former, by her fearless expressions of wit, exposed herself to the detestation of the majority of mankind. "She has shafts," said Napoleon, "which would hit a man if he were seated on a rainbow."
But the sweetly fawning, almost servile adulation of the _listening_ beauty brought her a corresponding throng of admirers. It sometimes seems that what is p.r.o.nounced wit, if uttered by a distinguished man, would be considered commonplace if expressed by a woman.
Parker"s ill.u.s.tration of Choate"s _rare humor_ never struck me as felicitous. "Thus, a friend meeting him one ten-degrees-below-zero morning in the winter, said: "How cold it is, Mr. Choate." "Well, it is not absolutely tropical," he replied, with a most mirthful emphasis."
And do you recollect the only time that Wordsworth was _really_ witty?
He told the story himself at a dinner. "Gentlemen, I never was really witty but once in my life." Of course there was a general call for the bright but solitary instance. And the contemplative bard continued: "Well, gentlemen, I was standing at the door of my cottage on Rydal Mount, one fine summer morning, and a laborer said to me: "Sir, have you seen my wife go by this way?" And I replied: "My good man, I did not know until this moment that you _had_ a wife!""
He paused; the company waited for the promised witticism, but discovering that he had finished, burst into a long and hearty roar, which the old gentleman accepted complacently as a tribute to his brilliancy.
The wit of women is like the airy froth of champagne, or the witching iridescence of the soap-bubble, blown for a moment"s sport. The sparkle, the life, the fascinating foam, the gay tints vanish with the occasion, because there is no listening Boswell with unfailing memory and capacious note-book to preserve them.
Then, unlike men, women do not write out their impromptus beforehand and carefully h.o.a.rd them for the publisher--and posterity!
And now, dear friends, a cordial _au revoir_.
My heartiest thanks to the women who have so generously allowed me to ransack their treasuries, filching here and there as I chose, always modestly declaiming against the existence of wit in what they had written.
To various publishers in New York and Boston, who have been most courteous and liberal, credit is given elsewhere.
Touched by the occasion, I "drop into" doggerel:
If you p.r.o.nounce this book not funny, And wish you hadn"t spent your money, There soon will be a general rumor That you"re no judge of Wit or Humor.