slanders, scandals, and what not.

Now, for this waste of words there is but one cure: and if I be
told that it is a natural fault of women; that they cannot take
the calm judicial view of matters which men boast, and often boast
most wrongly, that they can take; that under the influence of
hope, fear, delicate antipathy, honest moral indignation, they
will let their eyes and ears be governed by their feelings; and
see and hear only what they wish to see and hear--I answer, that
it is not for me as a man to start such a theory; but that if it
be true, it is an additional argument for some education which
will correct this supposed natural defect. And I say deliberately
that there is but one sort of education which will correct it; one
which will teach young women to observe facts accurately, judge
them calmly, and describe them carefully, without adding or
distorting: and that is, some training in natural science.

I beg you not to be startled: but if you are, then test the truth
of my theory by playing to-night at the game called "Russian
Scandal;" in which a story, repeated in secret by one player to
the other, comes out at the end of the game, owing to the
inaccurate and--forgive me if I say it--uneducated brains through
which it has passed, utterly unlike its original; not only
ludicrously maimed and distorted, but often with the most
fantastic additions of events, details, names, dates, places,
which each player will aver that he received from the player
before him. I am afraid that too much of the average gossip of
every city, town, and village is little more than a game of
"Russian Scandal;" with this difference that while one is but a
game, the other is but too mischievous earnest.