That is a fair question. Many an ambitious and idealistic young American matron has tried to solve it. She has found that the materials were a little scarce--the people who could talk brilliantly are very rare. But brilliancy is always a miracle, and it can be dispensed with. The real trouble lies elsewhere.
The fact is that in our present industrial system the need for social life is in inverse ratio to the opportunity for it. The people who need social intercourse are those who do hard work. The people who have most money and leisure, the most opportunity for social life, are those who have too much of it, anyway. Moreover--and this is an important point--no one profits less by leisure and money than those who have a great deal of it. Consequently, the basis of "society" today is a class of people naturally and inevitably inferior. It is this class which dominates "society," which gives the tone, and which sets the standard. So long, then, as "society" is dominated by inferiors, intelligent men and women will not be inclined to waste what time they have for social intercourse in such stupid activities as those that "society" can furnish. They will flock by themselves, and if they become undemocratic and unsocial as a result, that will appear to them the lesser evil. So that, however catholic our standards, the saloniere, as a bounden failure, has no place in this transcript of feminism.
One thing will be observed with regard to these following papers--though they are imbued with an intense interest in women, they are devoid of the spirit of Romance. I mean that attitude toward woman which accepts her sex as a miraculous justification for her existence, the belief that being a woman is a virtue in itself, apart from the possession of other qualities: in short, woman-worship. The reverence for woman as virgin, or wife, or mother, irrespective of her capacities as friend or leader or servant--that is Romance. It is an attitude which, discovered in the Middle Ages, has added a new glamour to existence. To woman as a superior being, a divinity, one may look for inspiration--and receive it. For those who cannot be fired by an abstract idea, she gives to imagination "some pure light in human form to fix it." She is the sustenance of hungry souls. Believe in her and you shall be saved--so runs the gospel of Petrarch, of Dante, of Browning, of George Meredith.