feminine bosoms. The very suggestion is, of course, absurd--whereas with
women, in very deed, it is as with the temple in Keats's lines:

... even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple's self.

Properly understood, therefore, the cult of the skirt-dancer has a
religious significance, and man's preoccupation with petticoats is but
the popular recognition of the divinity of woman. All that she is and
does and wears has a ritualistic character, and she herself commands our
reverence because we feel her to be the vessel of sacred mysteries, the
earthly representative of unearthly powers, with which she enjoys an
intimacy of communication denied to man. It is not a reasonable feeling,
or one to be reasoned about; and that is why we very properly exempt
woman from the necessity of being reasonable. She is not, we say, a
reasonable being, and in so saying we pay her a profound compliment. For
she transcends reason, and on that very account is mysteriously wise,
the wisest of created things--mother-wise. When we say "mother-wit," we
mean something deeper than we realize--for what in the universe is wiser
than a mother, fed as she is through the strange channels of her being
with that lore of the infinite which seems to enter her body by means of
organs subtler than the brain?

A certain famous novelist meant well when recently he celebrated woman
as "the mother of the male," but such celebration, while ludicrously
masculine in its egotistic limitation, would have fallen short even if
he had stopped to mention that she was the mother of the female, too;
for not merely in the fact that she is the mother of the race resides
the essential mystery of her motherhood. We do not value woman merely,