supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall avail him nothing; what the
woman said first, that (unless she has forgotten it) she will
repeat at the end. Hence, at the very junctures when a talk
between men grows brighter and quicker and begins to promise to
bear fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with dissolution.
The point of difference, the point of interest, is evaded by the
brilliant woman, under a shower of irrelevant conversational
rockets; it is bridged by the discreet woman with a rustle of silk,
as she passes smoothly forward to the nearest point of safety. And
this sort of prestidigitation, juggling the dangerous topic out of
sight until it can be reintroduced with safety in an altered shape,
is a piece of tactics among the true drawing-room queens.

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our
choice and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal
imposed upon them from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt,
with so much constancy; their motherly, superior tenderness to
man's vanity and self-importance; their managing arts - the arts of
a civilised slave among good-natured barbarians - are all painful
ingredients and all help to falsify relations. It is not till we
get clear of that amusing artificial scene that genuine relations
are founded, or ideas honestly compared. In the garden, on the
road or the hillside, or TETE-A-TETE and apart from interruptions,
occasions arise when we may learn much from any single woman; and
nowhere more often than in married life. Marriage is one long
conversation, chequered by disputes. The disputes are valueless;
they but ingrain the difference; the heroic heart of woman
prompting her at once to nail her colours to the mast. But in the
intervals, almost unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the
whole material of life is turned over and over, ideas are struck