Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/257

 with that of the professional stoker or engine-driver. Nevertheless, no reasonable woman ought to mind other women looking ugly if they like; while men, of course, are always men, and "masters of the planet," whether dirty or clean. And no one should really object to the "motor craze," seeing that it takes so many useless people out of one's immediate horizon and scatters them far and wide over the surface of the earth. Society uses Sunday as a special day for this "scattering," and perhaps it is doing itself no very great harm. It is getting fresh air, which it needs; it is "going the pace," which, in its fevered condition of living fast, so as to die more quickly, is natural to it; and it is seeing persons and places it never saw before in the way of country nooks and old-fashioned roadside inns, and rustic people, who stare at it with unfeigned amusement, and wonder "what the world's a'-comin' to!" Possibly it learns more in a motor drive through the heart of rural England than many sermons in church could teach it. The only thing one would venture to suggest is that in passing its Sundays in this fashion, Society should respect the Sundays of those who still elect to keep the seventh day as a day of rest. Fashionable motorists might avoid dashing recklessly through groups of country people who are peacefully wending their way to and from church. They might "slow down." They might take thoughtful heed of the little children who play unguardedly about in many a village street. They might have some little consideration for the uncertain steps of feeble and old persons who are perchance blind or deaf, and who neither see the "motor"