comes from a quite different character than myself. He is a great man;
he has read everything; seen everything; known everybody. Exception to
him could be taken only on one ground. He is perfectly awful. He
belongs to an old school; splenetic, choleric. He is
Sir-Anthony-Absolute-like; a critic in the spirit of the thundering
days of William Ernest Henley. His face is like a beefsteak. His
frame is like "a mountain walking." His voice, Johnsonian. He knows
more about literature than probably any other living man.

"No, sir," he rumbled, "you cannot find to-day a cigar-smoking animal"
(though the Colonel is so erudite a man, his language is terrible) "who
could be lured into the pages of our women novelists without
snorts--snorts, sir--of disgust, or bellows of derisive mirth. Why?
Because these pages no longer contain an acute transcript of life as
only a sensitive feminine mind would have the cunning to observe it,
and of a form of human life in itself highly feminine in its character,
but they now present a singularly insular travesty of man, an
unconscious caricature of man as he could only appear to a feminine
mind bound by the romantic limitations of sex, a mind, that is, devoid
of masculine understanding, unable to recognise by virtue of
affiliation of instinct that which is fine in the male character and
that which is false to type.

"Sir," continued the Colonel, "these pictures are coloured, on one
hand, by ludicrous prejudice against masculine qualities which the
feminine nature temperamentally feels to be antagonistic, or dangerous,
to itself; and, on the other hand, by sentimental worship of masculine
attributes conceived to be desirable complements to the frailty of
women. This amusing view of man springs not only from the element of
sex, as I have said, but from the very marrow of sex. We do not get