or super-refined form of strength. "Whose action is no stronger than a
flower." But is the action of a flower any less strong because it is not
the action of a fist? As a motive force a flower may be, and indeed has
time and again been, stronger than a thousand fists. And what then shall
we say of the action of that flower of flowers that is woman--that
flower that not only once or twice in history has

... launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium.

Woman's helplessness, forsooth! On the contrary, woman is the best
equipped fighting machine that ever went to battle. And she is this, not
from any sufferance on the part of man, not from any consideration on
his part toward her "weakness," but merely because he cannot help
himself, because nature has so made her.

No simple reasoning will account for her influence over man. It is not
an influence he allows. It is an influence he cannot resist, and it is
an influence which he cannot explain, though he may make believe to do
so. That "protection," for example, which he extends to her from the
common physical perils with which he is more muscularly constituted to
cope--why is it extended? Merely out of pity to a weaker being than
himself? Does other weakness always command his pity? We know that it
does not. No, this "protection" is but a part of an instinctive
reverence, for which he can give no reason, the same kind of reverence
which he has always given to divine beings, to any manifestation or
vessel of the mysteriously sacred something in human life. He respects
and protects woman from the same instinct which makes him shrink from
profaning an altar or robbing a church, or sends him on his knees before
any apparition supposedly divine. Priests and women are often classed