right for a woman of exceptional charm or exceptional cleverness to
evade motherhood, unless, perhaps, to become a teacher. A woman evading
her high calling, must not be conceded the same claim upon men's toil
and service as the mother-woman; more particularly Lady Greensleeves
must not flaunt it over the housewife. And here also comes the question
of the quality of jealousy, whether being wife of a man and mother of
his children does not almost necessarily give a woman a feeling of
exclusive possession in him, and whether, therefore, if we are earnest
in our determination not to debase her, our last shred of polygamy does
not vanish. From first to last, of course, it has been assumed that a
prolific polygamy alone can be intended, for long before we have
plumbed the bottom of the human heart we shall know enough to imagine
what the ugly and pointless consequences of permitting sterile polygamy
must be.

Then into all this tangle, whether as a light or an added confusion it
is hard to say, comes the fact that while we are ever apt to talk of
what "a woman" feels and what "a man" will do, and so contrive our
code, there is, indeed, no such woman and no such man, but a vast
variety of temperaments and dispositions, monadic, dyadic, and
polymeric souls, and this sort of heart and brain and that. It is only
the young fool and the brooding mattoid who believe in a special
separate science of "women," there are all sorts of people, and some of
each sort are women and some are men. With every stage in educational
development people become more varied, or, at least, more conscious of
their variety, more sensitively insistent upon the claim of their
individualities over any general rules. Among the peasants of a
countryside one may hope to order homogeneous lives, but not among the
people of the coming state. It is well to sustain a home, it is noble
to be a good mother, and splendid to bear children well and train them