the jaws of Mrs MacStinger is by comparison a true tragic object of
pity and terror. I find in my own plays that Woman, projecting herself
dramatically by my hands (a process over which I assure you I have no
more real control than I have over my wife), behaves just as Woman did
in the plays of Shakespear.

And so your Don Juan has come to birth as a stage projection of the
tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman; and my Don Juan is the
quarry instead of the huntsman. Yet he is a true Don Juan, with a sense
of reality that disables convention, defying to the last the fate which
finally overtakes him. The woman's need of him to enable her to carry
on Nature's most urgent work, does not prevail against him until his
resistance gathers her energy to a climax at which she dares to throw
away her customary exploitations of the conventional affectionate and
dutiful poses, and claim him by natural right for a purpose that far
transcends their mortal personal purposes.

Among the friends to whom I have read this play in manuscript are some
of our own sex who are shocked at the "unscrupulousness," meaning
the total disregard of masculine fastidiousness, with which the woman
pursues her purpose. It does not occur to them that if women were as
fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the
race. Is there anything meaner then to throw necessary work upon other
people and then disparage it as unworthy and indelicate. We laugh at the
haughty American nation because it makes the negro clean its boots and
then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact
that he is a shoeblack; but we ourselves throw the whole drudgery of
creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any womanliness
or delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction. There are no
limits to male hypocrisy in this matter. No doubt there are moments when