When Her Ladyship finally acquires the sealskin coat on which she has
long set her heart, does she continue to scan the advertisements? Does
she still coddle him who hath all power as to sealskin coats, with
tempting dishes and unusual smiles? Not unless she wants something else.

Still, it is woman's tendency to make the best of what she has, and
man's to reach out for what he has not. Man spends his life in the
effort to realise the ideals which, like will-o'-the-wisps, hover just
beyond him. Woman, on the contrary, brings into her life what grace she
may, by idealising her reals.

In her secret heart, woman holds her unchanging ideal of her own
possible perfection. Sometimes a man suspects this, and loves her all
the more for the sweet guardian angel which is thus enthroned. Other
men, less fine, consider an ideal a sort of disease--and they are
usually a certain specific.

But, after all, men are as women make them. Cleopatra and Helen of Troy
swayed empires and rocked thrones. There is no woman who does not hold
within her little hands some man's achievement, some man's future, and
his belief in woman and God.

She may fire him with high ambition, exalt him with noble striving, or
make him a coward and a thief. She may show him the way to the gold of
the world, or blind him with tinsel which he may not keep. It is she who
leads him to the door of glory and so thrills him with majestic purpose,
that nothing this side Heaven seems beyond his eager reach.

[Sidenote: The Potter's Hand]