abolish woman from the universe. But the opinion dies hard that she is best
off when least visible. These appeals which still meet us for "the sacred
privacy of woman" are only the Invisible Lady on a larger scale. In ancient
Boeotia, brides were carried home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at
the door in token that they would never again be needed. In ancient Rome,
it was a queen's epitaph, "She stayed at home, and spun,"--_Domum servavit,
lanam fecit_. In Turkey, not even the officers of justice can enter the
apartments of a woman without her lord's consent. In Spain and Spanish
America, the veil replaces the four walls of the house, and is a portable
seclusion. To be visible is at best a sign of peasant blood and
occupations; to be high-bred is to be invisible.

In the Azores I found that each peasant family endeavored to secure for one
or more of its daughters the pride and glory of living unseen. The other
sisters, secure in innocence, tended cattle on lonely mountain-sides, or
toiled bare-legged up the steep ascents, their heads crowned with
orange-baskets. The chosen sister was taught to read, to embroider, and to
dwell indoors; if she went out it was only under escort, and with her face
buried in a hood of almost incredible size, affording only a glimpse of
the poor pale cheeks, quite unlike the rosy vigor of the damsels on the
mountain-side. The girls, I was told, did not covet this privilege of
seclusion; but let us be genteel, or die.

Now all that is left of the Invisible Lady among ourselves is only the
remnant of this absurd tradition. In the seaside town where I write, ladies
of fashion usually go veiled in the streets, and so general is the practice
that little girls often veil their dolls. They all suppose it to be done
for complexion or for ornament; just as people still hang straps on the
backs of their carriages, not knowing that it is a relic of the days when
footmen stood there and held on. But the veil represents a tradition of