by magic, but by hard common sense. The problem before her was
simply one of organization. Many men had tackled it, and all of
them had failed stupendously. What she did was to bring her
feminine sharpness of wit, her feminine clear-thinking, to bear upon
it. Thus attacked, it yielded quickly, and once it had been brought
to order it was easy for other persons to carry on what she had
begun. But the opinion of a man's world still prefers to credit her
success to some mysterious angelical quality, unstatable in lucid
terms and having no more reality than the divine inspiration of an
archbishop. Her extraordinarily acute and accurate intelligence is
thus conveniently put upon the table, and the amour propre of man
is kept inviolate. To confess frankly that she had more sense than
any male Englishman of her generation would be to utter a truth too
harsh to be bearable.


The second delusion commonly shows itself in the theory, already
discussed, that women are devoid of any sex instinct--that they
submit to the odious caresses of the lubricious male only by a
powerful effort of the will, and with the sole object of discharging
their duty to posterity. It would be impossible to go into this
delusion with proper candour and at due length in a work designed
for reading aloud in the domestic circle; all I can do is to refer the
student to the books of any competent authority on the psychology
of sex, say Ellis, or to the confidences (if they are obtainable) of any
complaisant bachelor of his acquaintance.