Among the working-classes of the West there
is to be found a kind of ministering beauty which makes its way
everywhere, springing from the hands of woman. When the dwelling is
cramped, the purse limited, the table modest, a woman who has the gift
finds a way to make order and puts care and art into everything in her
house, puts a soul into the inanimate, and gives those subtle and
winsome touches to which the most brutish of human beings is sensible.
But in China woman does nothing of this. Her life is unaesthetic to the
last degree. No happy improvisations or touches of the stamp of
personality enter her home; one cannot trace the touches of witchery in
the tying of a ribbon. Everywhere you find the same class of furniture
and garniture, the same shape of table, of stool, of form, of bed, of
cooking utensils, of picture, of everything; and all the details of her
housekeeping are so apathetically uninteresting. The Chinese woman has
no charming art, rather is it a common, horrid, daily grind. She is not,
as the woman should be, the interpreter in her home of her own grace,
and she differs from her Western sister in that it is impossible for her
to express in her dress also the little personalities of character--all
is eternally the same.
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