The Disagreeable Girl

England's most famous dramatist, George Bernard Shaw, has placed in the

pillory of letters what he is pleased to call "The Disagreeable Girl."



And he has done it by a dry-plate, quick-shutter process in a manner

that surely lays him liable for criminal libel in the assize of

high society.



I say society's assize advisedly, because it is only in society that the

Disagreeable Girl can play a pr minent part, assuming the center of the

stage. Society, in the society sense, is built upon vacuity; its favors

being for those who reveal a fine capacity to waste and consume. Those

who would write their names high on society's honor roll, need not be

either useful or intelligent--they need only seem.



And this gives to the Disagreeable Girl her opportunity. In the paper

box factory she would have to make good; Cluett, Coon & Co. ask for

results; the stage demands at least a modicum of intellect, in addition

to shape, but society asks for nothing but pretense, and the palm is

awarded to palaver. But do not, if you please, imagine that the

Disagreeable Girl does not wield an influence. That is the very

point--her influence is so far-reaching in its effect that George

Bernard Shaw, giving cross-sections of life in the form of dramas,

cannot write a play and leave her out.



She is always with us, ubiquitous, omniscient and omnipresent--is the

Disagreeable Girl. She is a disappointment to her father, a source of

humiliation to her mother, a pest to her brothers and sisters, and when

she finally marries, she slowly saps the inspiration of her husband and

very often converts a proud and ambitious man into a weak and

cowardly cur.



Only in society does the Disagreeable Girl shine--everywhere else she is

an abject failure. The much-vaunted Gibson Girl is a kind of de luxe

edition of Shaw's Disagreeable Girl. The Gibson Girl lolls, loafs,

pouts, weeps, talks back, lies in wait, dreams, eats, drinks, sleeps and

yawns. She rides in a coach in a red jacket, plays golf in a secondary

sexual sweater, dawdles on a hotel veranda, and can tum-tum on a piano,

but you never hear of her doing a useful thing or saying a wise one.

She plays bridge whist, for "keeps" when she wins, and "owes" when she

loses, and her picture in flattering half-tone often adorns a page of

the Sunday Yellow.



She reveals a beautiful capacity for avoiding all useful effort.



Gibson gilds the Disagreeable Girl.



Shaw paints her as she is.



In the _Doll's House_ Henrik Ibsen has given us _Nora Hebler_, a

Disagreeable Girl of mature age, who, beyond a doubt, first set George

Bernard Shaw a-thinking. Then looking about, Shaw saw her at every turn

in every stage of her moth-and-butterfly existence.



And the Disagreeable Girl being everywhere, Shaw, dealer in human

character, cannot write a play and leave her out, any more than the

artist Turner could paint a picture and leave man out, or Paul Veronese

produce a canvas and omit the dog.



The Disagreeable Girl is a female of the genus homo persuasion, built

around a digestive apparatus that possesses marked marshmallow

proclivities. She is pretty, pug-nosed, pink, pert and poetical; and at

first glance, to the unwary, she shows signs of gentleness and

intelligence. Her age is anywhere from eighteen to twenty-eight. At

twenty-eight she begins to evolve into something else, and her capacity

for harm is largely curtailed, because by this time spirit has written

itself in her form and features, and the grossness and animality which

before were veiled are becoming apparent.



Habit writes itself on the face, and body is an automatic recording

machine.



To have a beautiful old age, you must live a beautiful youth, for we

ourselves are posterity, and every man is his own ancestor. I am to-day

what I am because I was yesterday what I was. The Disagreeable Girl is

always pretty, at least we have been told she is pretty, and she fully

accepts the dictum.



She has also been told she is clever, and she thinks she is.



The actual fact is she is only "sassy."



The fine flaring up of youth has tended to set sex rampant, but she is

not "immoral" save in her mind.



She has caution to the verge of cowardice, and so she is sans reproche.

In public she pretends to be dainty; but alone, or with those for whose

good opinion she does not care, she is gross, coarse and sensual in

every feature of her life. She eats too much, does not exercise enough

and considers it amusing to let other people wait on her and do for her

the things she should do for herself. Her room is a jumble of disorder.

The one gleam of hope for her lies in the fact that out of shame, she

allows no visitor to enter her apartments if she can help it. Concrete

selfishness is her chief mark. She will avoid responsibility, side-step

every duty that calls for honest effort; is untruthful, secretive,

indolent and dishonest.



"What are you eating?" asks Nora Hebler's husband as she enters the

room, not expecting to see him.



"Nothing," is the answer, and she hides the box of bonbons behind her,

and soon backs out of the room.



I think Mr. Hebler had no business to ask her what she was eating--no

man should ask any woman such a question, and really it was no

difference anyway. But Nora is always on the defensive and fabricates

when it is necessary, and when it isn't, just through habit. She will

hide a letter written by her grandmother as quickly and deftly as if it

were a missive from a guilty lover. The habit of her life is one of

suspicion, for being inwardly guilty herself, she suspects everybody

although it is quite likely that crime with her has never broken through

thought into deed. Nora will rifle her husband's pockets, read his

note-book, examine his letters, and when he goes on a trip she spends

the day checking up his desk, for her soul delights in duplicate keys.



At times she lets drop hints of knowledge concerning little nothings

that are none of hers, just to mystify folks.



She does strange, annoying things simply to see what others will do.



In degree, Nora's husband fixed the vice of finesse in her nature, for

when even a "good" woman is accused she parries by the use of trickery

and wins her point by the artistry of the bagnio. Women and men are

never really far apart anyway, and women are largely what men have

made them.



We are all just getting rid of our shackles; listen closely, anywhere,

even among honest and intellectual people, if such there be, and you can

detect the rattle of chains.



The Disagreeable Girl's mind and soul have not kept pace with her body.

Yesterday she was a slave, sold in a Circassian mart, and freedom to her

is so new and strange that she is unfamiliar with her environment, and

she does not know what to do with it.



The tragedy she works, according to George Bernard Shaw, is through the

fact that very often good men, blinded by the glamour of sex, imagine

they love the Disagreeable Girl, when what they love is their own

ideal--an image born in their own minds.



Nature is both a trickster and a humorist, and ever sets the will of the

species beyond the discernment of the individual. The picador has to

blindfold his horse in order to get him into the bull-ring, and

likewise, Dan Cupid does the myopic to a purpose.



For aught we know, the lovely Beatrice of Dante was only a Disagreeable

Girl, clothed in a poet's fancy, and idealized by a dreamer. Fortunate

was Dante that he worshipped her afar, that he never knew her well

enough to be undeceived, and so walked through life in love with love,

sensitive, saintly, sweetly sad and most divinely happy in his

melancholy.