experience and intelligent sympathies write a book for women, in which
he would treat plainly of the normal circle of their physiological
lives; but this would be a method of dealing with the whole matter which
would be open to criticism, and for me, at least, a task difficult to
the verge of the impossible. I propose a more superficial plan as on the
whole the most useful. The man who desires to write in a popular way of
nervous women and of her who is to be taught how not to become that
sorrowful thing, a nervous woman, must acknowledge, like the Anglo-Saxon
novelist, certain reputable limitations. The best readers are, however,
in a measure co-operative authors, and may be left to interpolate the
unsaid. A true book is the author, the book and the reader. And this is
so not only as to what is left for the reader to fill in, but also has
larger applications. All this may be commonplace enough, but naturally
comes back to one who is making personal appeals without the aid of
personal presence.

Because what I shall write is meant for popular use rather than for my
own profession, I have made my statements as simple as possible.
Scarcely a fact I state, or a piece of advice I give, might not be
explained or justified by physiological reasoning which would carry me
far beyond the depth of those for whom I wrote. All this I have
sedulously avoided.

What I shall have to say in these pages will trench but little on the
mooted ground of the differences between men and women. I take women as
they are to my experience. For me the grave significance of sexual
difference controls the whole question, and, if I say little of it in
words, I cannot exclude it from my thought of them and their
difficulties. The woman's desire to be on a level of competition with
man and to assume his duties is, I am sure, making mischief, for it is