The dual life is led solely by men, and until women have found out
its full compass and meaning, they can never lead in the world.
There is the public life and the private; and the men who are most
successful in the former are the most exclusive in the latter.
Women have only learned to lead one life; they must be all public or
all private, there is no medium. Those who give up the private life
for which Providence destined them, to assume the public existence
to which their own conceit urges them, have their own reward. They
taste all the bitterness of fame and never know its sweets, because
the bitterness is public and the sweets are private.

Women cannot understand that part of a man's life which brings him
into daily contact with men whom he does not bring home to dinner.
One woman does not know another without bringing her in to meals and
showing her her new hat. It is merely a matter of custom. Men are
in the habit of associating in daily, almost hourly, intercourse
with others who are never really their friends and are always held
at a distance. It is useless attempting to explain it, for we are
merely reprimanded for unfriendliness, stiffness, and stupid pride.
Soit! Let it go. Some of us, perhaps, know our own business best.
And there are, thank Heaven! amidst a multitude of female doctors,
female professors, female wranglers, a few female women left.

Jack Meredith knew quite well what he was about when he listened
with a favourable ear to Durnovo's scheme. He knew that this man
was not a gentleman, but his own position was so assured that he
could afford to associate with any one. Here, again, men are safer.
A woman is too delicate a social flower to be independent of
environments. She takes the tone of her surroundings. It is, one
notices, only the ladies who protest that the barmaid married in