precepts of the Founder of Christianity, and the fact has passed into
proverb. Their gentleness, like the so-called honour of men, is
visible only in situations which offer them no menace. The moment
a woman finds herself confronted by an antagonist genuinely
dangerous, either to her own security or to the well-being of those
under her protection--say a child or a husband--she displays a
bellicosity which stops at nothing, however outrageous. In the
courts of law one occasionally encounters a male extremist who tells
the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even when it is
against his cause, but no such woman has ever been on view since
the days of Justinian. It is, indeed, an axiom of the bar that women
invariably lie upon the stand, and the whole effort of a barrister who
has one for a client is devoted to keeping her within bounds, that the
obtuse suspicions of the male jury may not be unduly aroused.
Women litigants almost always win their cases, not, as is
commonly assumed, because the jurymen fall in love with them, but
simply and solely because they are clear-headed, resourceful,
implacable and without qualms.


What is here visible in the halls of justice, in the face of a vast
technical equipment for combating mendacity, is ten times more
obvious in freer fields. Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a
serious controversy with a woman, say in the departments of
finance, theology or amour, must inevitably carry away from it a
sense of having passed through a dangerous and almost gruesome
experience. Women not only bite in the clinches; they bite even in
open fighting; they have a dental reach, so to speak, of amazing
length. No attack is so desperate that they will not undertake it,
once they are aroused; no device is so unfair and horrifying that it