They say this lovely sensitive modesty of the Irish girl is dying out. The penny novelette, the spread of emancipation and education--save the mark!--facilities of communication, have done away with it. More’s the pity if this be true, for it was a bloom on the womanhood of Ireland no polish can replace; it added something incommunicably lovable to the grace of the girls, something holy, almost august, to the tenderness of the mothers.
When the Signora was a child in Ireland the peasant wife still spoke of her husband as “the master”; and in the wilds of Galway, quite recently, she has seen the women in the roads pull their shawls over their faces at the approach of a stranger. The humble matron of the older type will still walk two paces behind her husband. These are, of course, but indications of the austere conception of life which an unquestioning acceptance of her faith kept alive in the breast of the Irishwoman. When she promised to love and honour him, the husband became _de facto_ “the master.” Yet the influence of the Irish wife and mother in her own home in no way suffered from this conception of her duty. She was as much “_herself_” upon the lips of her lord as he “_himself_” upon hers. It used to be a boast that the purity of the Irish maiden and the Irish mother was a thing apart, inassailable. The Signora’s recollections of Ireland, of a childhood passed in a country house that kept itself very much in touch with its poor neighbours and dependants, bring her back many instances of drunkenness among the men, alas! and the consequent fights and factions; of slovenliness among the women, and hopeless want of thrift and energy; in one or two instances, indeed, of flagrant dishonesty; but she never remembers a single occasion marked by the shocked whisper, the swift and huddled dismissal, or any of the other tokens by which a fall from feminine virtue is mysteriously conveyed to the child mind.
Among all the poor cottage homes, the various farms, great and small, prosperous or neglected, each with their strapping brood of splendid youth, never one can she recollect about whose name there was a silence; never a single one of these dewy-eyed, fresh-faced girls that did not carry the innocence of their baptism in the half-deprecating, half-confident looks they cast upon “the quality.”