Selina: Her Hopeful Efforts and Her Livelier Failures

You have long urged me to an attempted portrayal of the American girl of the '80's. I take it that you from your viewpoint coming from long absence from your own country, look upon her and her moment as in some sense significant.

As I read this girl and the conditions surrounding her, born late, Victorian, she came into being when those sincere and fine tenets upon which the Victorian era founded itself, were become the letter of the original vital idea, and the moment itself sentimental, trite and prudish. Outcome and victim of the inefficiencies of an hour so flabby and platitudinous, this young girl of these Victorian '80's apparently not only repudiated her condition made up of absurdities, futilities and inadequacies, but in her maturity has lapsed over into the post-Victorian era as pioneer, she and her companions of that day, who blazed the way for the army of women now following. Following where, you ask? Ah, now, that is another question, and one I am not at all qualified or prepared to answer.

In the fact that she did repudiate her day and her condition lies the significance which you see, as I take it. That I have read her at the moment of my depicting, piteous rather than pertinent, helpless more than heroic, and groping rather than grasping, I hope will not disappoint you. So she appears to me; her gravest need, the lack of which renders her piteous and helpless, being a sense of proportion; a lack answerable to the false standards around her, or to her sex, or both, who among her sex shall say?

And that this epic of her days is chronicle of but the small and the petty happening, you will forgive, because this same day made up of the small and seemingly petty, is one of the things, she will tell you now, against which she revolted.

Nor am I defending her, nor claiming that she needs defense. As I see her and have tried to set her down. I offer her to you.

G. M. M.

August, 1914.

Anchorage, Kentucky.