then, if I were a woman myself, I daresay I should hold the
reverse; and at least we all enter more or less wholly into
one or other of these camps. A man who delights women by his
feminine perceptions will often scatter his admirers by a
chance explosion of the under side of man; and the most
masculine and direct of women will some day, to your dire
surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of
personation. Alas! for the man, knowing her to be at heart
more candid than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through
these mazes in the quest for truth. The proper qualities of
each sex are, indeed, eternally surprising to the other.
Between the Latin and the Teuton races there are similar
divergences, not to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy.
And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of this life,
which pass current among us as the wisdom of the elders, this
difficulty has been turned with the aid of pious lies. Thus,
when a young lady has angelic features, eats nothing to speak
of, plays all day long on the piano, and sings ravishingly in
church, it requires a rough infidelity, falsely called
cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after all.
Yet so it is: she may be a tale-bearer, a liar, and a thief;
she may have a taste for brandy, and no heart. My compliments
to George Eliot for her Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of
satire she has transmuted to the ends of art, by the companion
figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted for the
education of young men. That doctrine of the excellence of
women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false. It
is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry, that you
take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike,
frailties; whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than