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Cristina came into our home circle like a trumpeter-swan into a fowl-run. She came with her seven trunks and her clattering tongue and her unpredictable moods and her golf bags and her sapphire-studded lighter and her piratical sports car and her tendency to shed things in all parts of the house and her disregard of my work-hours and her blandly solemn way of accepting herself as something in answer to prayer.

She came with her five-ounce frocks and her unexpected flashes of emotionality and her devastating candor and her childlike combativeness and her equally childlike craving for affection and her eternal lip-sticks and compacts and pocket-mirrors and her imperial American demand for due homage to her carefully perpetuated artlessness. Yet Cristina, it must be remembered, was no longer a fledgling. There were, in fact, authentic family records to show that she would never see twenty-five again. And more than once I’d brought a flash of indignation to her limpid eyes by calling her an old maid. Not that there was anything austere and spinster-like about Cristina. Her darkest trouble, as I diagnosed it, was not that she hated Man but that she had liked altogether too many men. She had been unable to see the forest for the trees, for those sturdy oaks that stand so thick about any appealingly dependent vine. She had, I’m afraid, enjoyed life so much that she’d forgotten how to live. But now that she was settling on me like a buffalo-bird on a grazing bizon I concluded that I’d take a hand in the molding of Cristina’s character. I’d let in a little light there, no matter what it cost. And I’d see to it, eventually, that she married young Roddie Jones, who was a likable sort of chap and in many ways too good for her.

I didn’t, of course, impart any of this to Cristina. She would only have laughed at me, and there is nothing more devastating than the scorn of a beautiful woman. I even suspect, in fact, that my fair sister-in-law had formed certain secret resolutions as to my own reformation. For it wasn’t long before the educative influence of her company began to assert itself.

I was behind a barricade of reference-books, toilsomely approaching the end of my eleventh chapter, when Cristina invaded my work-room. That room was supposed to be a private one, a sactum sanctorum of silent toil, impervious to all such distractions as dogs and children and women. But Cristina, of course, never bothered her head much about things like that.

“How do you like my new hat?” she asked as she blew in like a breath of spring and thrust my volume of Eddington to one side.

“Your what?” I inquired with that quarantining abstraction which served to hold most intruders at bay.

“My hat,” said the quite unimpressed Cristina.

I turned and inspected the hat, the hat adorning the head so provocatively cocked on one side. And it impressed me as amazingly like an inverted coal-scuttle erupting with Brazilian orchids.

So when Cristina repeated her question I told the truth. I told her that, speaking as a mere man, I thought it was terrible.

I could see her face cloud up for a moment. But her air became judicial again as she crossed the room to sit on the end of my work-table.

“You don’t think much about hats, do you?” she said as she watched me pick up the books that had fallen to the floor.

“On the contrary,” I retorted, “I’ve given a great deal of thought to hats, and especially women’s hats. And my impersonal study of such things has persuaded me that woman must be abysmally unsatisfied with her head. She’s always changing it and redecorating it. She’s always roofing herself with new colors, line-combinations and——”

“Combinations?” cut in Cristina. “Aren’t you getting a little mixed in your geography?”

“I’m speaking of hats,” I resumed, “and why women wear them. They certainly don’t wear them for warmth. And they no longer wear them for protection. All they stand for, as far as I can see, is extravagant ornamentation.”

“Isn’t that enough?” asked Cristina.

“It’s certainly enough,” I answered, “to exemplify woman’s innate histrionism, her insistence on continuous masquerade. And even when she gets a hat that impresses her as sufficiently decorative she never keeps it. She merely uses it to feed her frustrated soul with fictitious and factitious novelty. For the next month, whether she needs it or not, she springs a new monstrosity on you. In other words, she tires herself out trying to be fresh.”

Cristina’s smile was a cryptic one. “Men will never know how women love hats!”

“It’s more important,” I contended, “to know why you love them. And why your affection for them is so unstable. For what woman ever wore a hat for five years? Yet why not? You’ll wear a ring for five years. And a ring’s no more ornamental than that felt contraption frescoed with artificial flowers.”

“Then you don’t like it?” asked Cristina as she studied herself in a pocket-mirror.

“Assuming you asked me an honest question,” I told her, “I tried to give you an honest answer.”

Cristina essayed a little moue of disdain.

“You might have lied like a gentleman,” she protested as she reached for one of my cigarettes. And a trace of the wounded-gazelle look remained on her face as she once more took up her little mirror and reinspected the orchidian coal-scuttle.

“But should a gentleman lie?” I demanded, backing a little away from her smoke.

“He would, I think, if he had any chivalry left,” was Cristina’s retort.

“Just what,” I countered, “do you mean by chivalry?”

A faint spark of contempt seemed to flutter like a firefly in the meshes of Cristina’s meditative smile.

“Can any one who pretends to be a scholar say he’s never heard of the Golden Age of Chivalry?” she asked as she casually dropped her ashes on the carefully sorted pages of my eleventh chapter.

“Yes, Cristina, I’ve heard of that Golden Age,” I acknowledged with more acerbity than I’d intended, “and the more I’ve investigated it the more I’m persuaded it wasn’t quite so golden as modern women and the makers of our historical romances imagine. Those medieval knights mouthed a great deal about ‘God and the Ladies,’ and essayed frantic exhibitions of personal daring, but it rather startles the patient investigator to find how frequently their ladies were degraded by personal violence, how these same chivalrous warriors retained and exercised the legal right of wife-beating, and how their false code of honor, arbitrarily accentuating two or three virtues at the cost of many others, was restricted to only women of rank, and as such was a selfish and self-defeating class enterprise.”

“You sound exactly like an encyclopedia,” complained the cloudy-eyed Cristina. “And the Golden Age may have had its faults. But there’s a knightly code that must have begun away back before Mr. Cervantes made fun of it. It’s something that doesn’t change. Every woman loves and honors it in a man. And every woman expects it.”

“And why does she?” I demanded, rescuing my book-manuscript from its newer ashtray avocation.

“Because men are stronger than women,” retorted Cristina, after a moment’s thought. “And it kind of evens things up and lets the world go on when the strong are willing to give a fighting-chance to the weak.”

There was more sagacity in this than I looked for from Cristina. But I resented the way in which she was at the moment dropping her cigarette-ashes into my ink-well.

“Yes,” I reminded the fair Cristina, “I remember how, when the militant suffragettes were pouring acid in the mail-boxes, they complained about the London bobbies not treating them like ladies. And I remember how we used to abstain from smoking, after dinner, until the frailer sex had retired to the drawing-room, and how, in Europe, we never sat on a sofa when a female remained within our line of vision and never even mentioned legs when a petticoat was about. But you seem to be changing, my dear. And that, in turn, seems to threaten a corresponding change in man’s chivalrous attitude toward women.”

“We don’t change, old dear, we only pretend to,” said the girl, carelessly crumpling my papers as she crossed her knees. And, consistently enough, I thought of Edward III and the Countess of Salisbury’s garter.

“But you go into business and shoulder men out of jobs,” I ventured. “And you go on juries and hang men for murder. You earn your own bread and butter and vote for Volstead Amendments and carry your own latch-key and roll your stockings and have your own clubs and go in for athletics and smoke cigarettes and bathe in one-piece suits and even use swear-words and make arrests and frame platforms. And in spite of all this, you still insist on certain special privileges for your sex. You demand and enjoy that chivalrous indulgence which may be appropriately designated as the deferential differential of the male.”

“One doesn’t seem to get much of it around here,” complained Cristina, retreating from my table-end to the Windsor chair.

“But isn’t that a compliment to you?” I argued. “Wasn’t there always a tacit acknowledgement of mental inferiority as well as physical weakness in the extension of that old-fashioned chivalry to women? Wouldn’t you rather have honest, man-to-man candor and do away with that old blight of artificial gallantry, of deceit embowered in condescensions? Isn’t it about time to scrap those foolish old gestures? For instance, why in the name of common sense should a man take off his hat when a woman steps into an elevator with him?”

Instead of answering that final question of mine, Cristina asked me one of her own.

“Then why is it, when a steamer like the Titanic goes down in mid-ocean, men still stand back from the life-boats and say ‘Women and children first’?”

“That’s a hard nut to crack, Cristina, for heroism, of course is something more than racial custom. But it can’t be pure sex-chivalry, otherwise there’d be no girl babies thrown into the Ganges, and the Blonde Eskimos wouldn’t smother all their daughters but one.”

“Perhaps those things are done for business reasons,” suggested the nimble-minded Cristina.

“They are,” I promptly agreed. “Economic pressure undoubtedly prompts the partial elimination of the female, along the Ganges and the barbaric Arctic, and the woman-first slogan goes glimmering. And it was economic causes that contributed so greatly to the decay of romantic or medieval chivalry, just as they seem to be escorting twentieth-century sex-gallantry out of meeting. We spoke of elevators, but I notice, for example, that down in the business section of the city, it is no longer customary for men to stand bareheaded in an office-lift when a woman happens to be in it. And you no longer apologize for smoking on a bus or in a taxi when you see the newfangled lady beside you already opening her cigarette-case. And I know more than one business woman who declines to accept a subway seat when it is proffered to her by an equally tired business man.”

“But I’ll bet you a box of chocolates,” maintained Cristina, “she still likes that tribute to her sex!”

“But why should she demand it,” I required, “granting that it is a tribute?”

“She doesn’t demand it,” contended my tranquil-eyed opponent. “But she’s mighty grateful when she gets it.”

“You mean it’s a sop to her vanity, a personal and concrete vindication of her time-worn sex-charm, arguing she has still sufficient physical appeal to elicit some sacrificial effort from the enemy?”

“It’s much more than that, my dear,” said the girl with the Mona-Lisa smile. “Women don’t like over-mannered fops any more than men do. But life, you see, isn’t always easy for us. It’s considerably harder sometimes than you Solemn Thinkers dream. But we’ve found a couple of things that seem to make it easier for women. One is tact, which you can call a sense of the timely if you like, and the other is taste, which I suppose is more a sense of the appropriate. And chivalry, real chivalry, is in some way mixed up with these two things. I find it hard to explain just what I feel, for women don’t torture their minds in this matter as men do. They mostly leave it to instinct. But perhaps I can make it clearer by saying that chivalry is a sort of roof over the heads of our emotions. It shields our sensibilities—or perhaps I ought to say our personalities. Our personalities, you see, simply can’t run around the world naked, any more than our bodies can. We have to have protection there. So we put on ghostly clothes and build up invisible houses to stand between us and the forces of the world that keep assailing us.”

“But,” I essayed after thinking this over, “when undue attention is directed toward that protecting fabric, and when the shielding mansions become over-ornate, can’t you imagine an endless series of fantastic courtesies corrupting into what the Freudians might term narcissism?”

Cristina shrugged a slender shoulder as she looked about for the matches.

“Don’t hold us women responsible for those diseases with the big names,” she somewhat wearily parried. “Men, it seems to me, have always been as extravagant that way as women. I’ve forgotten about all the history I ever knew, but wasn’t it at the siege of Pontoise that the English and French stopped fighting to exchange ballades?”

“It was,” I reluctantly acknowledged. “But while we’re on that particular subject, young lady, I’d like to remind you that in the Crécy campaign the astute Edward managed to save his army by keeping the King of France so muddled in the intricacies of chivalrous deportment that when all the grand gestures were over the French sovereign woke up and found the battle lost.”

“Am I to infer from that,” demanded Cristina, “that women are in danger of losing the battle of life, because men are still half-way decent to them?”

“The half-way movements,” I said with dignity, “were not under discussion. We were mentioning, I believe, the extremes of chivalric activity. And such extremes, once they are divorced from common sense, can become more than ridiculous, as, for example, appears to have been the case in Poland where, when Augustus the Strong got drunk it was the pleasant custom for all his loyal subjects to become and remain as intoxicated as their king.”

“It sounds very silly,” averred Cristina. “And it wasn’t, of course, the right sort of politeness.”

That prompted me to ask Cristina a question. “How do you perspire?” I inquired.

Cristina’s mouth, as she stared at me with a slowly hardening eye, wasn’t exactly a rosebud.

“You know,” she finally observed, “you used to be a man of considerable delicacy.”

“And what am I now?”

“You’re being vulgar,” said the lady who painted her face in public but shaved her armpits in private.

“No, Aspasia the Second, I’m not,” I pointed out. “I’m merely trying to show you how relative all this politeness business is. For that’s the way, remember, the polite-minded Egyptian used to say, ‘How do you do?’”

Cristina’s lips curled a little.

“Well, we seem to have grown past that personal interest in one another’s pores,” she said as she applied an astringent powder to her own. “We’ve hammered down the harem walls, remember, and made man respect us for what we can do and not for what we are.”

“If you’ve done that,” I contended, “it’s only fair to assume that you’re ready to face the corollary of this particular proposition. I mean that if women continue to advance in sports and athletics as they are now doing, the captain of some future Titanic, on seeing his ship going down—or perhaps I ought to say on seeing her ship going down—will sternly announce the newer-fangled order: ‘Men and children first!’”

Cristina showed her impatience by uncrossing her legs and getting up from her chair.

“I don’t think it’s chivalrous to joke about a serious thing like that,” she announced. “Men want the race to continue, and it continues through women. You men are really serving your own selfish and social ends when you’re chivalrous to women at a time women most need chivalry, just as a farmer has to be patient with a setting hen. You’ve found, old dear, that it pays.”

“But can’t we hope for a day when men are so honest and aboveboard with women that——”

“Not in as crazily built a world as men have made it,” interrupted Cristina. “You see, if the Elizabethans had made better roads their Queen Bess would never have needed to miss the mud by walking over Sir Walter’s cloak. And men like making those little sacrifices.”

“But I’ve noticed,” I contended, “that the head of a firm doesn’t pop up out of his swivel-chair every time his stenographer comes into the office.”

“Of course not,” agreed the smiling Cristina, “any more than his lunch-club waitress swoons when he gives her a half-dollar tip.”

“You mean,” I triumphantly inferred, “that men and women really do permit chivalry to go to sleep during business hours?”

“I mean,” corrected Cristina, “that under different conditions men are chivalrous in a different way and in a different area. Instead of writing a sonnet to his lady’s eyebrow, the young cavalier of to-day probably takes her out and buys her a banana-float.”

“Which she enjoys more as a gracious gesture than as a mere comestible?” I ungraciously interrogated.

“But think of the fun,” countered the elliptical Cristina as she stood up and shook down her skirts, “you old hypocrites get out of being nice to a nice girl!”

“Yes, my dear,” I retorted as I turned to rearrange my papers. “And if you weren’t an exceptionally good-looking woman you’d have been kicked out of this room thirty minutes ago!”

Then, remembering myself, I got up solemnly from my chair. “Good morning,” I said, bowing as low as my obesity would allow.