Читать книгу Revolted Woman: Past, present, and to come - Charles G. Harper - Страница 6

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‘Certain Women also made us astonished.’—Luke, xxiv. 22.

She is upon us, the Emancipated Woman. Privileges once the exclusive rights of Man are now accorded her without question, and, clad in Rational Dress, she is preparing to leap the few remaining barriers of convention. Her last advances have been swift and undisguised, and she feels her position at length strong enough to warrant the proclamation that she does not merely claim equal rights with man, but intends to rule him. Such symbols of independence as latch-keys and loose language are already hers; she may smoke—and does; and if she does not presently begin to wear trousers upon the streets—what some decently ambiguous writer calls bifurcated continuations!—we shall assume that the only reason for the abstention will be that womankind are, generally speaking, knock-kneed, and are unwilling to discover the fact to a censorious world which has a singular prejudice in favour of symmetrical legs.

Society has been ringing lately with the writings and doings of the pioneers of the New Woman, who forget that Woman’s Mission is Submission; but although the present complexion of affairs seems to have come about so suddenly, the fact should not be blinked that in reality it is but the inevitable outcome, in this age of toleration and laissez faire, of the Bloomerite agitation, the Women’s Rights frenzy, the Girl of the Period furore, and the Divided Skirt craze, which have attracted public attention at different times, ranging from over forty years ago to the present day.

Several apparently praiseworthy or harmless movements that have attracted the fickle enthusiasm of women during this same period have really been byways of this movement of emancipation. Thus, we have had the almost wholly admirable enthusiasm for the Hospital Nurse’s career; the (already much-abused) profession of Lady Journalist; the Woman Doctor; the Female Detective; the Lady Members of the School Board; and the (it must be allowed) most gracious and becoming office of Lady Guardian of the Poor.

Side by side, again, with these, are the altogether minor and trivial affectations of Lady Cricketers, the absurd propositions for New Amazons, or Women Warriors, who apparently are not sufficiently well read in classic lore to know what the strict following of the Amazons’ practice implied; nor can they reck aught of the origin of the Caryatides.

Again, the Political Woman is coming to the front, and though she may not yet vote, she takes the part of the busybody in Parliamentary Elections, and already sits on Electioneering Committees.

In this connexion, it should not readily be forgotten that Mrs. Brand earned her husband the somewhat humiliating reputation of having been sung into Parliament by his wife at the last election for Wisbech, and thus gave the coming profession of Women Politicians another push forward. The dull agricultural labourers of that constituency gave votes for vocal exercises on improvised platforms in village school-rooms, nor thought of aught but pleasing the lady who could sing them either into tears with the cheap sentimentality of Auld Robin Grey, melt them with the poignant pathos of ‘Way down the Swanee River’, or excite their laughter over the equally ready humour of the latest soi-disant ‘comic’ song from the London Halls. Think upon the most musical, most melancholy prospect thus opened out before our prophetic gaze! What matter whether you be Whig or Tory, Liberal or Conservative, Rotten-Tim-Healeyite, or a member of Mr. Justin MacCarthy’s tea-party, so long as your wife can win the rustics’ applause by her singing of such provocations to tears or laughter as The Banks of Allan Water or Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay, or whatever may be the current successor of that vulgar chant?

But the so-called ‘New Purity’ movement, and novel evangels of that description, most do occupy the attention of the modern woman who is in want of an occupation.

We smile when we read of the proceedings of Mrs. Josephine Butler and her following of barren women who are the protagonists of the New Purity; for woman has ever been the immoral sex, from the time of Potiphar’s wife to these days when the Divorce Courts are at once the hardest worked in the Royal Courts of Justice, and the scenes of the most frantic struggles on the part of indelicate women, who, armed with opera-glasses and seated in the most favourable positions on Bench or among counsel, gloat over what should be the most repellent details in this constant public washing of dirty private linen, and survey the co-respondents with delighted satisfaction. The intensity of the joy shown by those who are fortunate enough to obtain a seat in court on a more than usually loathsome occasion is only equalled at the other extreme by the poignancy of regret exhibited by those unhappy ladies who have been unsuccessful in their scheming to secure places.

And, again, the reclamation of corrupt women, if not impossible, is rarely successful, for ‘woman is at heart a rake,’ and, as Ouida says, who has, one might surmise, unique opportunities of knowing, she is generally ‘corrupt because she likes it.’ Thus, throughout the whole range of history, Pagan or Christian, courtesans have never been to seek. They have, these filles de joie, always succeeded in attracting to themselves wealth and genius, luxury and intellect; and through their paramount influence, Society at the present day is corrupt to extremity. The Evangelists of the New Purity, who hold that the innate viciousness of man is the cause of woman’s subjection and inferiority, can have no reading nor any knowledge of the world’s history while they continue to proclaim their views; or else they know themselves, even as they preach, for hypocrites. For woman has ever been the active cause of sin, from the Fall to the present time, and doubtless will so continue until the end. It is not always, as they would have you believe, from necessity that the virtuous woman turns her back upon virtue, but very frequently from choice and a delight in sin and wrong-doing. How then shall the New Purity arise from the Old Corruption?

‘Who can find a virtuous woman?’ asks Solomon (Prov. xxxi. 10), and goes on to say that her price is far above rubies: doubtless for the same reason that rubies are so highly valued—because they are so scarce.

The trade of courtesan has always been numerous and powerful, and has been constantly recruited from every class. Vanity, of course, is the great inducement; love of dress and power, and greed of notoriety, are other compelling forces; and a joy in outraging all decency and propriety, of defying conventions of respectability and religion, is answerable for the rest.

This kind of woman makes all mankind her prey, and has no generous instincts whatever. Everything ministers to her vanity and lavish waste. It is a matter of notoriety that men of light and leading are drawn after her all-conquering chariot, and that in three out of every four plays she is the heroine.

She is cruel as the grave, heartless as a stone, and extravagant beyond measure. Her kind have utterly wasted the patrimony of thousands of dupes, and having reduced them to beggary the most abject and forlorn, have sought fresh victims of their insatiable greed.

They have ruined kingdoms, like the mistresses of Louis XIV. and XV. of France; they have brought shame and dishonour upon nations, like the dissolute women of Charles the Second’s court, who toyed with his wantons at Whitehall while the Dutch guns thundered off Tilbury; they have risen, like Madame de Pompadour, to a height from which they looked down upon diplomatists of the Great Powers of Europe—and scorned them; and the blood shed during many sanguinary wars has been shed at their behest. Courtesans have married into the peerage of England, and, indeed, some of the oldest titles—not to say the bluest blood—of the three kingdoms derive from the king’s women: Nell Gwynne, whose offspring became Duke of Saint Albans; Louise de Querouaille, created Duchess of Portsmouth; Barbara Palmer, made Duchess of Cleveland; and others. Lais and Phryne belong not to one period, but to all eras alike; Aspasias and Fredegondas are of all countries and of every class.

But ‘pretty Fanny’s ways’ are many and diverse. It may be that she is incapacitated or restrained from living as full and as free a life as she could wish. Very well: then she becomes a New Puritan, whose self-appointed functions are to those privy cupboards in which repellent skeletons are concealed; to the social sewers; and, in fine, to all those places where she can gratify the morbid curiosity which actuates the New Puritanical mind, rather than the hope of, or belief in, achieving anything for the benefit of the race.

If she has no wish to become a New Puritan, there be many other modern fads in which she may fulfil a part. She may, as a New Traveller, show us the glory of the New Travel, in the manner of that greatly daring lady, the intrepid Mrs. French-Sheldon, who, travelling at the heels of the masculine explorers of African wilds (carried luxuriously in a litter, accompanied with cases of champagne and a large escort of Zanzibari porters), went forth to study the untutored savage in his native wilds. But when the untutored presented themselves before this up-to-date traveller unclothed as well as unread, that very properly-tutored lady screamed, and distributed loin-cloths to these happy and yet unabashed primitives. She delivered an address before the British Association on her return from that unnecessary and futile expedition, in which she tickled the sensibilities of the assembled savants by describing how she kept her hundred and thirty Zanzibari coolies in order with a whip. She told the members of the Association that ‘she went into Africa with all delicacy and womanliness.’ Possibly; but judging her out of her own mouth, she must have left a goodly portion of those qualities behind her in the Dark Continent.

Other women travellers—of the type of Miss Dowie, for instance—are more unconventional, if less adventurous. She, a true exemplar of the women who would forget their sex—and make others forget it—if they could, climbed the Karpathian mountains in search of a little cheap notoriety, clad in knickerbockers, jacket, and waistcoat, and redolent of tobacco from the smoking of cigarettes. Her adventures added nothing to the gaiety of readers, nor to the world’s store of science; but we were the richer by one more spectacular extravaganza.

This is that somewhat repellent type, the mannish woman, who is not content to charm man by the grace and sweetness of her femininity, but must aspire to be a poor copy of himself. The type is common nowadays, and the individuals of it have gone through several phases of their singular craze. These are they who walk with the guns of a shooting party; who tramp the stubble and arouse the ill-humours of that creature of wrath and impatience, the sportsman who is eager for a drive at the birds. These women, not dismayed by the butchery of the battue, look on, and even carry a gun themselves; but they are the nuisances of the party, and flush covey after covey by showing themselves to the wary birds when they should be crouching down beside some windy hedge, in a moist and clammy October ditch.

‘Let us be unconventional, or we die!’ is the unspoken, yet very evident, aspiration of the Modern Woman; and, really, the efforts made in the direction of the unconventional are so uniformly extravagant that we almost, from sheer weariness and disgust, begin to wish she had gone some way toward adopting the alternative.

The New Woman will know naught of convention, nor submission. Her advocates do not hail from Altruria; they are aggressive, and devoured with a zeal for domination, in revolt from the ‘centuries of slavery’ to which, according to themselves, they have been compelled by Man. ‘Man,’ shrieks one, ‘is always in mischief or in bed.’ But she will have this changed; not, indeed, in the present generation of vipers, which is stubborn and stiff-necked in its wicked ways; but she will see, and urges her fellow-women to see also, that proper principles are spanked into the coming generations. Considering, however, that the nursery has ever been the woman’s peculiar province, surely the blame, if blame there be, must rest with her for the past and present faulty upbringing of the race. If ‘proper principles’ have not already had their part in the education of man, surely that must be owing solely to woman’s flagrant dereliction of duty.

Instances, neither few nor far between, may be urged of wives and mothers, possibly also sisters and maiden aunts, who have raised men to action and dragged them from a disgraceful sloth to an honourable industry. True, indeed, it were an altogether unjustifiable heresy to deny their influence and its beneficent effects; but to use it as an argument for placing women on an equality with men would be a non sequitur of the most absurd description. The influence wielded by those good women was so powerful for good because they were true to themselves and their sex; because they were, in a word, so womanly. The influence of the New Woman upon the man is, and shall be, nil, because the spirit of antagonism between the sexes is being aroused by her pretensions, and comradeship becomes impossible when woman and man fight for supremacy.

Women’s advocates come and go like summer flies, provoking to wrath by their insistent buzzing, but, when caught and examined, proving to be insignificant enough. They have their little day, and cease to be. Who, for instance, now remembers Mrs. Mona Caird, that unconventional person who floated into publicity on the ‘Marriage a Failure’ correspondence of the Daily Telegraph, some few years ago, and, in the heyday of her notoriety, wrote and published that weak and ineffectual novel, The Wing of Azrael? Other women, more advanced in shamelessness, have taken her place, and capped the freedom of her views with outlooks of greater licence.

And so the game proceeds: each woman daring a little further than her fellow-adventurer into the muddy depths of free selection; of freedom in contracting marriages and licence in dissolving them; each newcomer shocking the sensibilities of women readers with delightful thrills from the impropriety, expressed or implied, that runs through her pages as inevitably as the watermark runs through ‘laid’ paper.

It is amusing to note that, following the lead of the late lamented George Eliot, the greater number of these women writers of sexual novels scribble under manly pseudonyms. What, then! doth divinity after all hedge a man so nearly that to masquerade as a ‘John Oliver Hobbes,’ or a ‘George Egerton,’ is to draw an admiring crowd of women worshippers where, as plain Miss or Mrs., your immortal writings would fall flat? What a deplorable cacoëthes imprimendi this is, to be sure, that seizes upon the palpitating authoresses of Yellow Asters, Dancing Fawns, or Heavenly Twins; and how depraved the taste for indelicate innuendo and theories of licence that renders these books popular!

This manner of thing destroys all the respect for home life upon which English society was, until late years, so broadly based, and domesticity in consequence is become an old-fashioned virtue among women. They are only the older generation of matrons who practise it now, and when their race is run, and the New Woman shall have become sole mistress, the sweet domesticity of the Englishman’s home will have vanished.

For the New Woman is not womanly, except in the physiological sense, and there she cannot help herself. She will inevitably be the mother of the coming generation, but beyond that function imposed upon her by Nature, she is not feminine. She is rather what Mr. Frederic Harrison describes as the ‘advanced woman who wants to be abortive man,’ and she holds the fallacy that what man may do woman may do also—and more!

Directly a woman marries, she considers that she has full licence; although, goodness knows! the unmarried girls of to-day are latitudinarian enough, and do, unreproved, things that thirty years ago would have branded them with an ineffaceable mark of shame.

The pretty girl of to-day, who has earned her right to wear a wedding-ring, has no sooner returned from her honeymoon than she sets out upon a campaign of conquests. Smart men, who hate to be bored with the unmarried girl, before whom they must be either silent or discreet, hang around the young matron at garden parties and dances, or flirt shamefully in the semi-rusticity of the country house or shooting-box, and discuss with her the latest veiled obscenity of Mr. Oscar Wilde’s, or enlarge upon the ethics of a second Mrs. Tanqueray with an unblushing frankness that argues long acquaintance with and study of these putrescent topics. The young matron has full licence at this day, and the divorce courts afford some faint inkling of how she uses it. She aspires to be the boon companion of the men; she plays billiards with the manly cue, and not infrequently she can give the average male billiard-player points, and then beat him.

It seems but a few years since when women who smoked cigarettes were voted fast: to-day, the smoking-room of the country house is not sacred to the male sex, and the ‘good stories’ of that sometime exclusively masculine retreat are now not alone the property of the men. She has not annexed the cigar and the pipe yet—not because she lacks the will, but her physique is not yet equal to them; but she can roll a cigarette, can take or offer a light with the most practised and inveterate smoker who ever bought a packet of Bird’s Eye or Honey Dew, and she wears—think of it, O Mrs. Grundy, if, indeed, you are not dead!—a smoking-jacket.

At the more ‘advanced’ houses, amongst the ‘smartest’ sets, the women do not retire to the drawing-room at the conclusion of dinner—they sit with the men, not infrequently; and if the usual not over-Puritanical talk that was wont to follow upon the ladies’ withdrawal is not indulged in so openly, at least the conversation is sufficiently unconventional.

Slang and swearing are the commonest—in two senses—accompaniments and underlinings of the smart woman’s speech: any little disappointment that would have been ‘annoying’ to her mother is to the modern and up-to-date woman a ‘condemned nuisance,’ if not more than that; and ‘damns’ fall as readily from her lips as the mild ‘dear me!’ of a generation ago. For the first cause of this unlovely change we must look to the theatre and music-hall stages, whose women have in some few instances married the eldest sons of peers, and have succeeded to titles upon their husbands’ heirship being fulfilled. Their husbands’ titles have given them rank and precedence, whose mothers toiled at the wash-tub in some public laundry, or disputed not unsuccessfully with the most foul-mouthed of Irish viragoes on the filthy stairs of some rotten tenement in the purlieus of Saint Giles’s. The symmetry of their legs and the voluptuousness of their persons captivated the callow youths who night by night occupied the front rows of the stalls at the Gaiety Theatre, and who—under the well-known nickname of ‘Johnnies’—fed the Sacred Lamp of Burlesque with a stream of half-guineas. These heirs to wealth and hereditary honours kept the chorus-girls and skipping-rope dancers in broughams and villas ornées in the classic Cyprian suburb of St. John’s Wood, and, when they were more than usually foolish, married them.

Society is become, through them, quite demimondaine, and it is not uncommon to have pointed out to you in the Row titled women who have notoriously been under the protection of more than one man before they, by some lucky or unlucky chance, caught their coronets. Nearly all Society is free to-day to these whited sepulchres; only the Queen’s Court—that last bulwark of virtue and decency—holds out against them. Elsewhere they are more than tolerated; it is scarcely too much to say that they are admired by fin-de-siècle womanhood, who are notoriously and obviously Jesuitical. If the adaptation of their outrés manners is proof enough of admiration, then you shall find sufficient warranty for this statement, for the slangy girl or young married woman is rather the rule than the exception in this year of grace, and their manners are arrived at that complexion which would make their grandmothers turn in their graves, could that cold clay become sentient again for the smallest space of time.

This decay of decency began with the advent of that loathsome amalgam of vanity and reckless extravagance in dress and speech, the Professional Beauty, whose profession first became recognised about the year 1879. You will not find that ‘profession’ entered under ‘Trades’ in the Post-Office Directory; but if logic ruled the world, then the shameless women whose photographs for years filled the shop-windows of town would find their trade recognised on the same commercial standing with any one of the thousand and one ways of getting a living shown in that volume. They would be on precisely the same moral level with the quasi milliners of London, had necessity brought about their flaunting pervasion of Society, but, seeing that merely the love of admiration and notoriety induced their careers, it is difficult to find a depth sufficiently deep for them.

But indignation is apt to melt into a scornful pity when we see the Professional Beauty of sixteen years ago, who left her husband for the questionable admiration of great Personages and the envy of London Society, a faded and struggling woman of the world, who, without a shred of histrionic ability, has taken to the stage, relying upon the magnificence of her diamonds and the abandon of her dress for an applause which had never been hers for her acting or her elocution. A just resentment fades into melancholy commiseration for a woman like this, who has sunk so low that scandal can no longer harm her; who essays the rôle of ‘beauty’ when her years are rapidly totting up to fifty.

These are the tawdry careers which, appealing to woman’s innate love of admiration, bid her go and do likewise. The contempt with which all right-thinking men regard the spotted and fly-blown records of the Professional Beauties is hidden from them by the glare of publicity, and vanity still bids them adventure out from the home before the eye of the world.

One does not find the New Women justified of their sex, for cosmetics have no commerce with common sense, and high heels are not conducive to lofty thinking; rouge, violet powder, tight-lacing, or an inordinate love of jewellery, are not earnest of brain-power; and yet these are the commonest adjuncts to, or characteristics of, a woman’s life.

The sight of many diamonds at Kimberley impressed Lord Randolph Churchill mightily awhile ago, and the contemplation of those glittering objects of feminine adornment led to the historic pronouncement that ‘whatever may have been the origin of man,’ he is ‘coldly convinced that womankind are descended from monkeys.’ However that may be, certain it is that imitation is, equally with the simians, her forte. Men originate almost everything; even the fashions are set and controlled by M. Worth, and women follow his lead, both dressmakers and clients.

And Woman is a consistent and inveterate poseur, from the time of her leaving the cradle, through girlhood, young-womanhood, and matron-hood, to her last gasp. That tale of the old lady, dying from extreme age and decay of nature, who had her face rouged over against the arrival of her doctor, so that she should receive him to the best effect as she lay on her death-bed, is characteristic of her sex. Vanity, thy name is woman!

Could we but see her without her ‘side’! But we cannot. All the world’s a stage to her, and all the time she plays a part with an ineffable artistry of diplomacy beyond the understanding of a Richelieu or a Machiavelli. A statesman can frequently anticipate the ruses of a rival diplomat and thus check his schemes—because, being men, they both reason from a given point and can understand very accurately the workings of each other’s minds; but how shall one understand woman or predicate her actions when she does not understand herself or her fellow-feminines, and acts on the moment upon unreasoned impulse and pure caprice?

You may point to this and that feminine figure which has made an equable and logical course throughout her career, and exclaim triumphantly, ‘Here is the natural woman, without guile or self-consciousness: a logical and close-reasoning creature.’ Well, you are welcome to your opinion, pious, or derived from what shall seem to you as evidence sufficient for your contention. Hold it, nor inquire more narrowly, nor seek proselytes to your faith. The natural woman? My dear sir, how should your matter-of-fact and obvious nature distinguish the excellently-fashioned and well-assumed mask from the natural face? Summum ars—— you know the rest. Ponder it, nor prate glibly of natures, good sir!

Conceive of the dreadfully unreal puppets the novelists have created and labelled with feminine names. How the machinery creaks and rattles when the puppets move! With what unreal stagger they pace the stage, and how deep below contempt is the unlikeness to womankind of their ways and words.

For the nearest approach to an adequate portrayal of the feminine character, commend me to the women of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s novels, whose mental gyrations are set forth with a touch of inspiration: Bathsheba Everdene, Tess, Viviette, and the uncertain heroine of The Trumpet Major. Their speech has the convincing timbre of their sex; their walk is the true gait, not the masculine tramp that echoes through the pages of most men’s novels; and how truly like nature their tongues say ‘No,’ when their hearts throb ‘Yes, yes!’

They live, these women and girls—they breathe and palpitate with the full tide of life, and no other living novelist can so inform his feminine creations with reality.

But turn to the academic heroines of Mr. Besant. If they were not presented with the subtle suavity of his literary style, I do not know how we could endure the paragons of virtue and learning who occupy the foremost place in book after book that owns him author.

Phillis, in The Golden Butterfly, came as a novelty, but the type perpetuated in each succeeding novel—now as Armorel Rosevean in Armorel of Lyonesse; again, as Angela Messenger in All Sorts and Conditions of Men, and so onwards—is both monotonous and earnest of a poverty of imagination. They would seem to be frankly unreal: an acknowledged Besantine convention—analogous to that early Christian art by which representations of saints, with attendant aureoles, and posing in impossible attitudes, were shown, not as portraitures, but as religious abstractions. These maidens are all sweet and severely proper; as learned as professors and as didactic as lecturers, and they have haloes heavy with gilding. ‘I cannot,’ cries the novelist, in effect, ‘show you the living woman. Consider: how unforeseen her contradictory attitudes and consistent inconsistency.’ And this, after all, is wisdom: to portray your ideal of the sweet girl graduate; to sketch woman as she might be, rather than to fashion an inadequate presentment of woman as she is.

She will have to develop very greatly before she becomes the equal of man, either in mind or muscle; and she will have to slough some singular feminine characteristics if her incursions into masculine walks of life are to be continued. At present she carries her purse in her hand along the most crowded streets, at the imminent risk of its being snatched away. Ask her why she does this, and she will tell you that she has no pockets, or that they are difficult to reach, or else that they are too easily reached by pickpockets. It never occurs to her that the devising of new pockets comes within the range of the dressmaker’s craft. Not that it matters much; for the purse-snatcher obtains little result for his pains, and, beyond some postage-stamps, half a dozen visiting-cards, a packet of needles, and a few coppers, his enterprise usually goes unrewarded.

Woman does not date her correspondence. She has no ‘views’ on the subject; she simply forgets. Sometimes, indeed, she will head her letters with the day of the week; but, as the weeks slip by, a letter written on any ‘Wednesday’ becomes rather vague in date.

Also, it is notorious that the gist of a woman’s letter, the real reason of its being written, appears in a postscript.

Again, it surely does not behove the New Woman to throng the streets in front of the establishments of Mr. Peter Robinson or Madame Louise, in admiring ecstasies over novel cuts and colours, bows and bonnets, and all the feminine accoutrements of fashion. Conceive of men crowding the tailors’ and the haberdashers’ in like manner, and taking equal delight in ‘shopping!’ This last occupation, or rather pastime, of women is a certain sign of mental inferiority. A woman will spend a whole day ‘shopping’—that is to say, in the inspection of goods she does not want and has no intention of buying—and will return home when day is done and count her time well and profitably spent. ‘Shopping,’ as apart from any idea of purchasing, is a recognised form of feminine recreation, as tradesfolk know to their cost. Happy the shopkeeper whose trade does not lend itself to ‘shopping,’ but wretched is he where the vice is rampant. For woman is pitiless and exacting, impervious either to criticism, sarcasm, irony, or innuendo, on occasion; and the more logical the man with whom she contends, so much the more baffling is she to him. So, short of plain and possibly offensive speech (for none so readily or more causelessly offended than your ‘shopper’), the unhappy victims of this mania have no redress, but must continue to heap their counters with bales of cloth and rolls of silk for due examination, and must exhibit a Christian patience and forbearance when the ‘shopper’ departs without purchasing or apologising.

No mere man could do this, for such assurance could only proceed from the opposite sex.

A perusal of the advertisement sheets which form the bulk of women’s newspapers and magazines makes for disillusionment and depression; and you would need but little excuse if, after a course of these appeals to feminine love of adornment, you rose from it with a settled conviction that Woman is a Work of Art, padded here, pinched in there, painted, dyed, and carefully made up in every particular. He was, indeed, a philosopher worthy the name (or perhaps it was a more than usually candid woman!) who said that none of the consolations of religion or any pious ecstasies could equal the profound and solemn joy which accompanies a woman’s conviction of her being well dressed and the envy of her fellows.

Here, indeed, is another striking difference between the sexes. A man is happiest when circumstances permit him to don the old clothes which for years have been his only wear in leisure hours: he would wear them while out and about on his business did the convenances permit—so easy and comfortable is the old hat; so well adapted by long use is the old jacket to the form; so easy the bagged and misshapen trousers. But, alas! this may not be, for the world judges a man by his appearance, and it simply does not pay to appear in public otherwise than ‘well dressed.’ For dukes and millionaires ’tis another matter; they can afford to be ‘shabby’ and comfortable, and certainly, whether they manage to attain comfort or not, they generally contrive to appear ill-dressed and dowdy.

Woman is altogether different from and inferior to man: narrow-chested, wide-hipped, ill-proportioned, and endowed with a lesser quantity of brains than the male sex. She will, when sufficiently open to conviction, allow that, mentally, she is not so well equipped as man, but gives herself away altogether in insisting upon the ‘instinct’ that takes the place of reason in her sex; thereby tacitly placing herself on a level with other creatures—like the dog or cat—who act upon ‘instinct’ rather than upon reasoning powers. ‘A woman’s reason’ is a notoriously inadequate mental process; and, having once arrived at a conviction or a determination on any subject, it is of no use attempting to argue her out of it. That is widely acknowledged by the popular saying that ‘it is useless to argue with a woman’