the next; to feel the convictions of the vagabond; to grudge each sunbeam
that falls unseen by you on some mouldering gate in some neglected city,
each face of the living wherein possible life looks out untried by you,
each picture that means a new curiosity. No, for, after all, you are
material souls; you need a Bradshaw and a Baedeker, even in the land of
dreams. All men, I like to think, for one short breath in their lives,
believe this narrow world to be shoreless. They feel that they should die
in discontent if they could not experience, test, this wonderful
conglomerate of existence. It is an old, old matter I am writing you
about. We have classified it nicely, these days; we call it the "romantic
spirit," and we say that it is made three parts of youth and two of
discontent--a perpetual expression of the world's pessimism.

I look back, and I think that I have done you wrong. Women like you have
something nearly akin to this mood. Some time in your lives you would all
be romantic lovers. The commonest of you anticipate a masculine soul that
shall harmonize your discontent into happiness. Most of you are not very
nice about it; you make your hero out of the most obvious man. Yet it is
pathetic, that longing for something beyond yourselves. That passionate
desire for a complete illusion in love is the one permanent note you women
have attained in literature. In your heart of hearts you would all (until
you become stiff in the arms of an unlovely life) follow a cabman, if he
could make the world dance for you in this joyous fashion. Some are hard
to satisfy--for example, you, my lady--and you go your restless, brilliant
little way, flirting with this man, coquetting with that, examining a
third, until your heart grows weary or until you are at peace. You may
marry for money or for love, and in twenty years you will teach your
daughters that love doesn't pay at less than ten thousand a year. But you
don't expect them to believe you, and they don't.