Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/24

Those who are below it are rough and coarse, honest or not, as the case may be; but ever a terror. They are self-opinionated, careless in dress, words, and manner, because they do not wish to be otherwise. Want of personal refinement, absence of humor, jealousy, or indifference, mark them.

Average people, our needed commonplace friends, are the mean in the social relations of life between the two extremes of our ideals and realizations. They are constituted either as the average man or the average gentleman and the average woman or the average lady. So much conventionality has clung, in the past, to the word lady that the term woman was later employed, as indicating a being more nobly planned than its circumscribed and partial synonyme. But now no gentlewoman is content unless she is also called a lady, for the word woman has come to represent such intensified shortness in skirts, thickness in boots, such repulsive good sense and plainness