Birth comes. Birth-- The breathing re-creation of the earth! All earth, all sky, all God, life's sweet deep whole, Newborn again to each new soul! "Oh, are you? What a shame! Too bad, my dear! How will you stand it, too. It's very queer The dreadful trials women have to carry; But you can't always help it when you marry. Oh, what a sweet layette! What lovely socks! What an exquisite puff and powder box! Who is your doctor? Yes, his skill's immense-- But it's a dreadful danger and expense!"
It's all a powder-puff matter: marriage means new clothes, gifts, and a house to play with. It gives her another chance to get something for nothing--which is immoral. But the beauty of the situation is that the immorality (thanks to our habits of not thinking straight) is so perfectly concealed: it even appears that she is the one who does the giving. As for any bother about sex, she'll soon put an end to that. And so she goes on her pirate ways, luring for the sake of the lure, adding her voice to the already swelled chorus which proclaims that truth and beauty lodge in things as they are, not in things as they might or should be.
But, to return to the novelist's argument about clothes, the present fashion for low necks and slit skirts has nothing to do with sex necessarily. Its origin is in vanity--which may or may not have a bearing upon sex. And of course it usually hasn't; for vanity is an attribute of small natures, and sex is an attribute of great ones.
There has never been a time when women had such an opportunity to be beautiful physically. And they are taking advantage of it. Watch any modern matinée or concert or shopping crowd carefully. There's something about the new style that points to a finer naturalness, just as it is more natural for men to wear clothes that follow the lines of their bodies than to pad their shoulders and use twice too much cloth in their trouser legs. The move of muscles through a close-fitting suit gives an effect of strength and efficiency and animal grace that is superbly healthy. And it is so with women, too. With the exception of the foolish and unnecessary restrictions in walking women have such a splendid chance to look straight, unhampered, direct, lithe. I don't know just why, but I want to use the word "true" about the new clothes. They're so much less dishonest than the old padded ways--the strange, perverted, muffled methods. The old plan was built on the theory that the suppression of nature is civilization; the new plan seems to be that a recognition of nature is common sense. We may become Greek yet. By all of which I'll probably be credited with supporting the silly indecencies we see every day on the street--ridiculous, unintelligent manifestations of the new freedom--instead of merely seeing in its wise expression a bigger hope of truth. I think the preachers who are filling the newspapers with hysterical protests about women's dress had better look a little more closely at the real issue and stop confusing a fine impulse with its inevitable abuses.