much mechanical energy in any other way. Even her alleged
superior endurance, as Havelock Ellis has demonstrated in "Man
and Woman," is almost wholly mythical; she cannot, in point of
fact, stand nearly so much hardship as aman can stand, and so the
law, usually an ass, exhibits an unaccustomed accuracy of
observation in its assumption that, whenever husband and wife are
exposed alike to fatal suffering, say in a shipwreck, the wife dies
first.


So far we have been among platitudes. There is less of overt
platitude in the doctrine that it is precisely this physical frailty that
has given women their peculiar nimbleness and effectiveness on the
intellectual side. Nevertheless, it is equally true. What they have
done is what every healthy and elastic organism does in like case;
they have sought compensation for their impotence in one field
by employing their resources in another field to the utmost, and out
of that constant and maximum use has come a marked enlargement
of those resources. On the one hand the sum of them present in a
given woman has been enormously increased by natural selection,
so that every woman, so to speak, inherits a certain extra-masculine
mental dexterity as a mere function of her femaleness. And on the
other hand every woman, over and above this almost unescapable
legacy from her actual grandmothers, also inherits admission to that
traditional wisdom which constitutes the esoteric philosophy of
woman as a whole. The virgin at adolescence is thus in the position
of an unusually fortunate apprentice, for she is not only naturally
gifted but also apprenticed to extraordinarily competent masters.
While a boy at the same period is learning from his elders little more
than a few empty technical tricks, a few paltry vices and a few