Life and Gabriella by Ellen Glasgow — Read

"Who is Alice? " she wondered on her way home, "and for whom was she waiting? " A shopgirl perhaps, and he was, probably -- not a clerk in a shop -- he looked more like a mechanic -- but hardly a gentleman. Not, at any rate, what her mother or Jane would call a gentleman -- not the kind of gentleman that George was, or Charley Gracey, for instance. He was doubtless devoid of those noble traditions by and through which, her mother had always told her, a gentleman was made out of a man -- the traditions which had created Arthur and Cousin Jimmy as surely as they had created George and Charley. "I wonder what tradition really amounts to? " she thought, while she stood on the rear platform of a Harlem train, grasping the handle of the door as the car swung round a curve.

"All my life, I have been getting farther away from it -- a woman has to, I suppose, when she works -- and if I get away from it myself how can I honestly hold to it for men, who, according to mother, can't be gentlemen without it? " Then reverting to her first question, she resumed musingly: "Who _is_ Alice? It would be rather amusing to be Alice for one evening, and to find out what it means to be loved by a man like that, even if he isn't a gentleman. He was, I think, the cleanest creature I ever saw, and it wasn't just the cleanness of soap and water -- it went deeper than that. It was the cleanness of the winds and the sea -- as if his eyes had been washed by the sea. I wonder who Alice is? A common little shopgirl probably from Sixth Avenue, with padded hair and painted lips, and smelling of cheap powder. That's just the kind of girl to fascinate a big, strong, simple creature like that Yes, of course, Alice is cheap and tawdry and vulgar, with no substance to her mind."