Then I was responsible for the little-known institution which is called 'The New Chivalry'. I never could be very certain in my own mind whether the practice of the New Chivalry came before or after the theory of it; but the theory of it was this: It rested on the conception that a man is so overwhelmed and confounded by the superiority of woman in her works and graces that he is, so it were, paralyzed and glued to his seat, as wholly unable to offer her his clumsy assistance as he is unworthy to offer it. 'Who am I', he seems to say, 'that I should presume to open the door for one whose way of opening doors shows her to be a mistress of that subtle art? Shall I, in mere coarse patronage and condescension, pick up her pocket handkerchief, and thus rob the world of that sublime spectacle, that sweeping and seraphic gesture with which she picks it up?' This dream, however, also belongs to the past. Many ladies have told me that they prefer the crude obtrusiveness of the old chivalry; and one lady was even so cutting as to remark that she did not think the new chivalry was so very new. In the matter of courtesy I have come back to the most conventional views; and in theory I am quite well-bred. I think a man ought to take off his hat to a lady; he thinks he ought to take off his head to her. And I think he ought to pick up anything that she has dropped- unless, perhaps, it is an 'h'.

-August 4, 1906, Daily News