Why not the Eternal Male for a change?

Girls of my acquaintance are also beginning to grumble at her.  I often think it hard on girls that the artist so neglects the eternal male.  Why should there not be portraits of young men in different hats; young men in big hats, young men in little hats, young men smiling archly, young men looking noble.  Girls don’t want to decorate their rooms with pictures of other girls, they want rows of young men beaming down upon them.

But possibly I am sinning my mercies.  A father hears what young men don’t.  The girl in real life is feeling it keenly: the impossible standard set for her by the popular artist.

“Real skirts don’t hang like that,” she grumbles, “it’s not in the nature of skirts.  You can’t have feet that size.  It isn’t our fault, they are not made.  Look at those waists!  There would be no room to put anything?”

“Nature, in fashioning woman, has not yet crept up to the artistic ideal.  The young man studies the picture on the postcard; on the coloured almanack given away at Christmas by the local grocer; on the advertisement of Jones’ soap, and thinks with discontent of Polly Perkins, who in a natural way is as pretty a girl as can be looked for in this imperfect world.  Thus it is that woman has had to take to shorthand and typewriting.  Modern woman is being ruined by the artist.