THE ENGLISH WIFE
When I dine out and look around me, or when I am present at any other
social function at which men and their wives appear in unmistakeable
couples, the infinite variety of married people affects me strongly.
There they all are, Mrs Anderson who simply exists to provide a stout
and comfortable background for her picturesque husband, fragile Mrs
Conkling whose pathetic anxiety to bring out her angular husband’s
laboured wit would be tiresome if it were not so genuinely maternal,
Lady Manville of the truly refined apprehensions who puts up so
complacently with an irritable snob, Mrs Fitzmaurice who pants to live
up, and Mrs Dobbs who does not trouble to live down, to the man whose
name she carries, Mrs Cantelupe who mentally embraces the doctor, and
Mrs Martingale who openly snubs the Major, and many more of them, all
with nothing in common but that they are English wives. One might
imagine the existence of some subtle common bond that would unite
the persons who had gone in for so definite a profession—at least for
a woman—as matrimony. Yet it does not seem obvious even to the most
acute perception. If it were more obvious the question would not so
often insolubly put itself how such and such persons ever come to marry
at all. True, there are many married people who have to so successful
a measure assimilated one another that it is an impossible effort to
imagine them otherwise than married, yet in their case a more subtle
form of the question is often suggested, as to the spirit and the
emotion with which they first determined to unite their destinies.
Further investigations into the subconscious may in time reveal the
deep mysteries of affinity, real or imagined, but at present a dark
curtain hangs over them. It cannot be mere luck that makes an English
wife. The Englishman has a national, as well as an individual, quality.
His chief consoler and supporter, therefore, is likely to have some
national quality too, whether it dimly exists from the beginning in a
maidenly consciousness, or whether it grows in the married state as a
natural result of the contiguity. A Frenchman, or a French woman, who
had as sure a touch as the author of “Les Silences du Colonel Bramble,”
might throw some light on the nature of this essential quality, but
for an Englishman the task is too difficult to be formally attempted.
The best he could contribute would be sidelights and reflections.
A man may well ponder, as he seldom does, on the change of identity
undergone by a woman who takes another name on signing the register.
In general, the sacrifices and accommodations involved in marriage are
mutual. If the woman loses some independence, the man loses more; the
elimination of caprice is equal for both, though one may eliminate more
freely than the other; the community of goods and persons hits, on the
whole, both sides equally; both are vulnerable in the same degree by
ills affecting their complement. But a woman loses her maiden name,
and the man makes no equivalent sacrifice. The possibility of so doing
would hardly strike him, for the assumption of a new identity is to
him almost inconceivable. It would appear strange to him, indeed, if
the case were reversed, and that ever after marriage he should feel
about himself the implied question “Who _was_ he?” Men feel that there
is so little about themselves that requires explanation, a fact which
accounts for what is to women their extraordinary want of curiosity
about one another. Men take one another for granted as they take
themselves: were this state of things altered it would be tantamount
to a revolution. Men’s clubs, which flourish on the assumption of the
individual’s unalterable identity and a nebulous tolerance of most of
his general social connections, would find the new flavour of enigma
too disruptive for their continuance in comfort. There is no getting
over this difference by any amount of tact. The most unassuming of men,
the most diffident, amplifies his personality in marriage, casting his
name, like a protective cloak, round the person whom he has chosen
with a generous finality which makes any inquiry as to the nature of
her former covering theoretically superfluous. But the woman, however
fondly she may cherish the garment of her maiden name, even to the
extent of showing it at every opportunity through the chance openings
of her new covering, has accepted a restriction as she has accepted
a label. A man’s appellation or title reveals nothing of his private
state, but a married woman’s name is a sign to all the world that she
is, or has been, wrapped in the mantle of a man.
This act of envelopment, performed in the marriage ceremony, is
infinitely symbolic, allegorical, susceptible of amplification to any
sentimental or moral tune that you please. It is the commonplace of
the “few well-chosen words” to which married couples have to submit
from the steps of the altar. The symbol and the allegory, the moral and
the sentiment, are, however, less interesting than the actual degree
of reality which attends and follows the act. The grace or otherwise
which a wife imparts to the folds of the mantle around her is one of
the tests of proficiency in the married profession. It is a test out of
which the English wife comes very well; much better for instance than
the German, who accepts the covering with thankfulness and humility,
poking out a meek head now and then but otherwise only amplifying,
as the years go on, the circumference of the garment; whereas the
American assimilates the whole garment to herself with any amount of
dash, leaving it to her partner to supply the motive power and fill the
pockets, while taking up as little room as he conveniently can,—and the
American man’s capacity for social compression is as striking as his
capacity for commercial expansion.
The Englishwoman wears her mantle neither selfishly nor cringingly:
she appropriates her part of it with a natural dignity which so
incorporates it with herself that the imagination almost fails to
grasp the fact of her ever having been without it. She is by no means
indifferent to the fall of its folds round her own figure, taking
a good deal of pride and trouble in the arrangement of them, but
her self-consciousness in this respect does not make her forgetful
of the figure cut by her partner. She insists that the elegance of
his posture, which she would be the first to exaggerate, shall be
unimpaired by any extravagance on her part which might strain the
buttons or mar the flowing lines of the side which he presents to the
world. It is rather a heavy mantle that the Englishman throws, a solid
article in tweed or homespun, not lightly to be shifted and apt to be
impervious to gentle breezes as well as to more blustering elements:
but if the Englishwoman inevitably feels at times a trifle overpowered
and would gratefully welcome the respite of a button or two, she is not
given to any awkward wriggles of betrayal or to moppings of the brow in
public. In private the owner of the mantle may have, for his good, to
be aware of sharp elbows, and even to submit in domestic seclusion to
the terrifying total emergence from the common garment of an overheated
partner; but, after this salutary breathing space, he usually finds no
reluctance on her part to re-assume and rearrange the folds. He can,
in fact, rely upon his wife to minimise any possible appearance of
misfit, since an Englishwoman resents above all any diminution of the
common dignity, by which she means her husband’s dignity more than her
own. No wives are more proud of their husbands nor more anxious that
the world should appreciate them at their true worth: for failure in
this respect they are readier to blame the world’s obtuseness than any
defect in their own estimate.
The English wife’s greatest disappointment, perhaps, is that her
husband should fail to do himself justice by any fault of his own. She
will carry him gaily through failure after failure so long as her own
confidence is unimpaired, repairing the cuts and mending the holes worn
by unlucky tumbles so skilfully, in the happiest instances, as even to
escape his own eye; but if he slip through mere blundering awkwardness,
through diffidence or through shortsightedness in missing the step
obviously to be taken, then indeed she is smitten to the heart, for
has it not destroyed the great illusion, which she might be the first
to suspect but the last to give up, that it is he who is carrying her
through?
It is remarkable how this illusion persists, when it is an illusion, on
the part of a man, without his suspecting the reverse of the illusion
to be the truth, as it may sometimes be. The indignant refusal to
desert Mr Micawber was less, we may suspect (though _he_ did not), due
to a sense of his protection than to an agonised fear on his behalf.
Yet, even at the best, when a man does his fair share, even to a degree
of enviable brilliance, of carrying through, the amount contributed
by his wife towards diminishing her own and his dead weight is not so
widely recognised. A man, certainly an Englishman, is a costly engine
which requires a great deal of attention if the best is to be got out
of it: the feeding, coaxing, tuning up, adjustment and lubrication that
he constantly needs is enough to occupy one woman’s time for most of a
year. If he has never had it, he contrives to run along smoothly enough
with the attentions of well paid hirelings who see to his physical
lubrication, leaving the mental and emotional gear to look after
itself. But once he has it, he surrenders to its need. Thenceforward he
has nothing to do but to make his daily run in the outer world knowing
that a far more efficient and faithful attendant is waiting to adjust
any part of his gear that may have got shaken or damaged in the course
of the day. He would pretend to himself, I dare say, that he performs
similar services in return to his attendant, but he would find it hard
to substantiate his claim. The man returns from the day’s work with
the sense of having thrown off a burden till the next morning. Seldom
has a woman any similar sensation. Her burden, if less exhausting, is
practically continuous: she must sort out her pile of cares and get
to the bottom of them daily, for a household will not tolerate the
arrears which grow with impunity in a man’s office. If a man felt the
same responsibility for his wife’s welfare as she for his, his burden,
too, would be continuous. Nature is kind to him in this respect, or
perhaps she is only wise. If he is to do most of the public work of the
world, he must be allowed to be a trifle impervious to the need for
the private adjustments which are, strictly speaking, in his province.
He will be excused, even profusely visited with thanks, if he show
sympathy and gratitude. Who knows if the English wife gets enough of
these commodities, since she will seldom confess to their deficiency?
That her deserts are great no Englishman will deny, more than ever
since the war, which saw poignant anxiety, intensity of nervous strain,
every kind of economic difficulty and an incalculable increase in the
coefficient of domestic friction added to her normal lot. She bore it
all with courage, neither losing her presence of mind nor diminishing
her dignity; and though some hastily assumed and badly stitched
matrimonial mantles may have shown the strain of the violent disruption
during periods of the war, the majority showed what very serviceable
garments in time of stress they really were, capable of almost infinite
elasticity without the straining of a fibre, warming him in the camp
and her in her lonely bed.
During the war the English wife kept the English home going, and at all
times it is she who is the centre of the English home. This fact alone
would give her a unique position among wives, for the English home
is unique. If the man maintains it, the woman gives it its peculiar
character, and the character is one which at once impresses itself
upon all foreign observers. What the Englishwoman preserves, what she
warms, one might almost say, with her blood, is not a dining-room for
her husband, a nursery for her children, a drawing-room for herself
and a sleeping place for them all; it is not even only a focus for
purely family radiations to concentrate themselves upon; still less
is it just a background to set off the more agreeable side of life,
carefully concealing the obscure and dusty delvings that make it
possible. All these elements come into it, but there is much more. It
is the symbol of British hospitality, that spring of unsuspected warmth
in a traditionally cold nation, which guards its privacy fiercely that
it may share it without embarrassment. There is no stiffness in its
welcome, no constraint in its entertainment: that its guests should
for a moment forget their guesthood is its wish and its triumph. In
this triumph the woman has the greater share. However much her husband
may have invited, it is she who entertains. Her husband’s friendships
are to that extent in her keeping, for the masculine link that he has
strained in marrying cannot be reforged by his own good fellowship
alone.
Charles Lamb complained humorously of the behaviour of married
people in this respect, but his complaints have no great body in
them. A friendship that depended mainly upon bachelor roysterings
must inevitably suffer by a roysterer’s marriage, but to accuse the
English wife of wishing to destroy what is valuable in her husband’s
feelings for other men or women is to do her an injustice. Indeed, I
have often found the anxiety of English wives to prove the contrary
almost pathetic, and it may be advanced as a reasonable proposition
that the man who exchanges his welcome in a bachelor flat for one in an
English home has the better of the exchange. The note of the English
home, except in its most ceremonial moments, is domesticity, not a
domesticity of shirtsleeves and happy-go-luckydom, but one in which the
domestic affections do not find it necessary to run and hide themselves
in the closet when the frontdoor bell rings, and in which an increase
in the steam pressure of the domestic machinery is not obviously made
for the comfort of added society. The guest slides into an English
home, be it for an evening or for a month, as easily as a new leaf is
slid into the dining-room table. If any sacrifices are made on his
behalf, it is a matter of pride that he should be unaware of them: if
his pleasures are consulted it is, for him, with the assurance that the
meeting of them would only be an extension, the most natural in the
world, of the admirable activities of his host and hostess.
Few Englishwomen, perhaps, could preside in a _salon_, but nearly all
can infuse cheerful ease into a gathering of guests, whether it be
at a house party or a humble Sunday supper. Lady Monkshood, who puts
me at once at ease when I am ushered into a room full of opulent and
unknown strangers of a Saturday afternoon at The Hall, sheds no ray by
one atom warmer than little Mrs Periwinkle who keeps a piece of cold
beef and some stewed fruit going on Thursdays in the Temple for any
scribbling folk who care to drop in. And both of them, Lady Monkshood
and Mrs Periwinkle, have this in common, that there is no corner of the
globe in which they show to greater advantage than in the room where
they welcome their friends. The Englishwoman’s home is her most perfect
setting, and those who do not know her in it know her not. She grows
into it, by some wonderful instinct of Englishwomen, irradiating it
and letting it irradiate her. Her husband may show to more advantage
in spacious and crowded scenes, but if she look not well at her own
table she will look well nowhere: for in the house that she has made
her own, built up and ruled, among the “things” that are so part of
herself that she can hardly leave them without a pang, even for the joy
of returning to them with rapture, watching the service which answers
her will and the faces which reflect her love, an added grace is given
to her figure, a brightness to her eyes and a melody to her voice. The
homes of England go far to make England herself, they are her mystic
source of strength, her pledge of security. Not all are splendid, not
all have ease; care knocks daily at the door of too many, as poverty
too often dims their lustre: but within them all the same essential
quality shines out, of hospitality without ceremony, comfort without
extravagance, intercourse without parade; and the Englishwoman with her
unostentatious pride, her wistful solicitude, her rather unresponsive
mind and her extremely sensitive heart is there at the centre.
Wherefore those misguided women are to be reprobated who, having the
means at their disposal to create an English home, use them to produce
the illusion of a cosmopolitan hotel. This crime, whether it be due to
American influence and example, or only inspired by the mad desire to
spend an unnecessary amount of money, must fortunately be rare, if it
is unfortunately conspicuous. It is almost impossible to believe that
one of English blood who in youth has known any of the spell thrown
over the existence of those who share it by an English home can have
the misguided courage to banish voluntarily so much that is precious
from their life. A home can be rich as well as poor, as complete in a
palace as in a cottage, but those who land themselves in great houses
which they cannot assimilate, filling them with objects for which
they have neither affection nor reverence, creating no atmosphere but
that of magnificence, asking for no service but that of well-paid but
stingily given obsequiousness, who gather guests as carelessly as
the footman shovels coal and disperse them as nonchalantly as the
housemaid scatters ashes, having thrown before them all the impersonal
luxuries of which a Ritz can boast—those are the people who have
forgotten what home, what comfort, what cosiness, what an English
hearth, an English gathering round an English fire, an English muffin,
an English welcome can be to those who have not lost one of the most
desirable sweets of their nationality, how gracious their appeal to the
happily present, how warm and soothing their memory to the unwillingly
absent.
The inner light, however, the participation in a perfect spirit and a
peculiar, fine-flavoured quality, which distinguishes the English home
does not, I fear, carry with it an irreproachability in externals. Here
the English wife is perhaps less admirable. The temperamental harmony
of the home so often is somewhat oddly contrasted with the decorative
inharmoniousness of its material objects. Let me hasten to admit that
when the Englishwoman has taste in her choice of a setting for herself
she has very good taste indeed. She can achieve, at her best, with
her _mise en scène_, her hangings, her furniture, her colours, her
pictures, her ornaments, the same successful temperamental fusion that
she achieves in her personal relations. She can create the appearance
in a room of being continuously and gracefully inhabited, of having
come together in all its parts inevitably, not for show but for the
plainer usages of life, and yet keep it fresh and unruffled, free from
the dusty footmarks of yesterday as from the odour of yesterday’s
meals. The drawing-room or sitting-room of an enlightened English woman
is neither a salon, awful in its bleak precision, nor simply a feminine
boudoir, beflowered and rustling like a _robe de chambre_ to which the
entry of a man, even of a husband, takes on the air of a gallantry or
an intrusion. It remains sacred to the woman, yet rather as the main
sanctuary of the household of which she is the priestess than as the
holy of holies; and, in this connection, it is interesting to remark
that the English woman, as a rule, has no visible inner sanctuary.
She carries it, I suspect, so securely in her own heart that her
writing table and her workbox are sufficient to contain its material
overflow. This capacity for fusion is naturally most remarkable when
it is æsthetic as well as temperamental, but striking success on the
side of temperament will carry off a wonderful measure of æsthetic
incongruity. There are rooms that I know full of conventional horrors,
all photographs and sham Chippendale, easy chairs and uneasy tables,
that I would not have changed for the world for the sake of the friend
who animates them. Yet it must be confessed that the majority of our
women have little taste in the appointments of a house. A long and
bad Victorian tradition may to some extent account for this, but it
is due also to a want of clearness in balancing the claims of comfort
and beauty, and to a certain practical hastiness, a kind of unselfish
frugality, which forbids them to spend too much forethought on what is
not in itself immediately useful.
Much may be forgiven, no doubt, to those who can afford little, but
might they not at least make better use of the space which the builder
has given them, not by filling every inch of it, but by letting it do
a little more work unhindered? Most English rooms give one the sense
of being hemmed in on every side by the furniture and of being at all
points afflicted by a multiplicity of objects which seem unable to
give any satisfactory explanation of their presence to any interested
observer. This mania for overcrowding rooms is not confined to any
one stratum of society: the millionairess who encumbers herself with
Chinese porcelain, Chelsea figures, brocade cushions and satinwood
tables suffers from it just as badly as the greengrocer’s wife whose
parlour, with its photographs of all possible relations, its glass
vases dangling prisms, its presents from various seasides, its
mats, antimacassars and footstools, has hardly a spare inch of space
uncovered. We have not much to learn from the Japanese, I believe, but
a touch of their unfailing eye for the proper effect of simplicity and
congruity would be an excellent addition to the æsthetic equipment of
the Englishwoman, just as in dress she owes herself a lesson from the
Frenchwoman in the art of completeness in every detail from hat and
hair to shoes. In matters of decoration, domestic as well as personal,
the Englishwoman is a good improviser but a bad composer.
* * * * *
It might seem unnecessary to dwell at all on what the English wife
takes from her husband and what she gives him, seeing that we are
a race of the most frantic writers and readers of novels under the
sun. Nevertheless it would be impossible in this chapter to omit the
conjugal relation which, while it reflects in its changes the manners
of different generations, remains all through something essentially
English. The humility of the mediæval _châtelaine_ which persisted
in the ceremonious respect of a Duchess of Newcastle for her “dear
lord,” and the rather pompous solemnity of the early nineteenth century
with which Mrs Briggs addressed “Mr Briggs” as such even in his
portly presence are now things of the past, having fled scandalised
before the easy familiarity of more modern husbands and wives: but
there would appear less difference than might be supposed if the
Duchess of Newcastle beloved by Lamb could exchange sentiments with
a wife of to-day. They would find, in particular, a common fund of
that protective tenderness which is characteristic in the attitude
of an Englishwoman to her husband, whom she regards in some aspects
as a mother regards her son strutting in his first pair of trousers
before admiring friends: she adores his grown up airs and would not
reveal to him for worlds that he is not yet quite capable of looking
after himself. It is for this that she puts up so kindly with his
idiosyncracies, not because he is a man whose will is law and whose
whims are not to be questioned. She feels that she is to some extent
responsible for him, not only in the home, but in the outer world: to
the wise fairy who orders his domestic interior she adds the character
of interpreter whose aim is to reveal his promising social exterior
to a possibly unappreciative audience, much in the manner that a
bilingual Hottentot, producing a white man before his tribe, would
give them to understand that he came in every way up to the best
Hottentot standards of good manners and capability. In the same spirit
she is ever ready to act as his shock-absorber, ready to undergo every
compression on her own part for the sake of his smoother daily progress.
A man, though he might naturally wish to do so, cannot act as a buffer
for his wife except in the greater shocks of life where the strain on
the joint machine is much eased by any elasticity on his part: the
smaller jars and jolts occur in the home where he is inevitably the
passenger. It is she upon whom falls the daily impact of breakages,
leakages of domestic energy, minor and unceasing adjustments and
all the host of inquiries which may be generically described as the
"Pleas’m"s. If she is occasionally exasperated at the complacency
with which he receives the service, she has the good sense to reflect
that if the passenger were continually worrying about the feelings of
the springs he would never have the heart to drive anywhere at all;
and, since he is unavoidably there in the seat, it is better that he
should get up some momentum than subject the springs to the motionless
pressure of his own dead weight.
The English wife does not exact a punctilious politeness from her
husband, which is only an instance of the general difficulty that
English people experience in associating polished manners with
familiarity. Politeness for them is a mark of distance, and its
use in any degree of social proximity has the air of hoisting a
telescope to see one’s friends across a table: it is a source, even,
of suspicion, and there are few of us sufficiently enlightened not to
feel almost unconsciously the “Garn, ’oo are yer gettin’ at?” which
rises to the lips of our less cultured citizens on being treated to
any address at all elaborately flavoured. There is sound sense, not
merely boorishness, at the bottom of this instinctive suspicion, for
forms and ceremonies are at their best a mask to conceal more natural
emotions, though we do not always too nicely judge the moments when
these emotions might be more profitably concealed than revealed. At
the same time, the English wife expects a good deal of attention from
the man who, presumably, first won her by his attentions, and feels
aggrieved if she does not get it. The English husband—and he would be
the first to admit it—is expected to remain _l’amant de sa femme_ and
to abound in those attentions great and small which are easily prompted
by the emotion of passionate love, but sprout less eagerly from the
more solid but less exciting relation of the _ami_, in the conjugal
sense of that word. The happiest wife has her _amant_ and _ami_ in one,
and she is slow, for all that the novelists and dramatists may say,
to look for the former away from home. Most of our country women are
more ready to face the great disillusionment with resignation than to
seek a new revelation as an antidote. But it is not easy to destroy
the illusions of an Englishwoman or, as it may be better put, they are
not often totally destroyed. One reason for this, perhaps the chief,
is that neither the Englishman nor Englishwoman have, in early life,
formed a passionate ideal of _l’amour_ to be destroyed in the process
of daily realisation. They regard the prospect of “settling down” with
equanimity, having usually had before their eyes an example of the
amount of tenderness and affection which attend the settlement, and
being too practical to imagine themselves ever taking desperate and
decisive action to assuage a merely emotional longing for an intangible
something. We are too ready adventurers in the realm of the concrete to
waste our energy on less promising quests in the realm of ideas. All
our adventures, marriage included, have a practical aim which keeps our
roving desires in a fairly domesticated condition, like house terriers
who hunt a rabbit now and then rather than greyhounds for ever
straining at the leash. The English wife views her husband’s rabbit
hunts with the complacency of a good mistress, quite ready to admire
the good figure that he cuts, provided the chase is not tiresomely
prolonged. She will even allow the rabbits to make a polite semblance
of being caught, so long as it is perfectly understood that it is
all a game and so long as they do not too shamelessly wait for their
pursuer. She does not claim so much indulgence for herself, knowing
that her husband’s progress is a serious walk rather than an amiable
constitutional, and that the distraction caused by having to turn and
whistle after a rabbit-hunting companion would be too trying for his
temper. It is usually enough for her to let him suspect her virtuously
avoided opportunities, with a hint of her successful chases before she
caught him.
Mr H. G. Wells, in a series of novels after the “New Machiavelli,”
tried to make us believe that the triangular drama was as common in
England as in other nations, and quite as well suited to our ordinary
habits. It was a foolish attempt to ascribe the passions of the few to
the temperaments of the many. Wives of Sir Isaac Harman and Passionate
Friends are no more characteristically English than Don Quixote, except
in an extremely attenuated sense. There are people in London, also
conspicuous at the Russian ballet, who find a diversion in a display
of promiscuity, though they are a small and despicable section of
the community: but the seeker after a maximum of loves and lovers
is not the typical Englishman or woman, just as Mr Walter Sickert’s
back bedrooms and lumbar nudities are not typical English scenery.
No doubt, as a nation, we are sexually unimaginative, which leads
us into a false puritanism, makes our marriage laws grossly unfair,
hinders enlightened attempts to amend them, and complacently allows
the worst of all diseases to do its fell work upon the population.
But eroticism, we may be thankful, is alien to us, particularly as
any attempt to translate eroticism into adequate or possible social
terms is bound to be, as Mr Wells shows, a dismal failure. The English
woman and the English man, like all others of the species, are liable
to be misled by their physical desires, but their good sense and
their innate domesticity are too strong to countenance any hasty
experiments in the relations which they consider sacred and vital. It
is good philosophy, surely, to take things as they are, not as you
might wish them to be. It is the athletic activity, the courage, the
practical energy of the Englishwoman which make her, possibly, ascetic
in her imagination and prim even in her abandonments. To a Frenchman
it is always problematical whether a given woman is virtuous, to an
Englishman her virtue is a natural assumption: the difference indicated
in the women of the two nations is obvious. The Englishwoman can answer
the reliance of the man with a self-reliance which is one of her most
charming qualities; the Frenchwoman can only answer her countrymen’s
suspicion by an elaborate avoidance of any appearance of justifying
it: and the mind of the latter is occupied with infinite possibilities
the absence of which from the mind of the average Englishwoman allows
her to be more spontaneous, if also more frivolous. In the future of
feminism, they will get over their frivolity quicker than their French
sisters with their excessive caution, and, without the showy exuberance
of the American sister, will give the most solid contribution to the
welfare of the human race. In marriage, which also purges frivolity,
the Englishwoman has already shown the measure of her strength and
of her wisdom. If, prone to material waste and putting sentiment
before utility, she has yet to become an adept in the theory of social
economy, her practical instinct, aided by her admirable economy of
emotion, make her by temperament and by experience a woman of action,
a staunch comrade and an agreeable companion. She is fitted to teach
as much, at least, as she will ever have to learn, nor has she anything
to fear from any comparison made over the whole ground of womanly
activities, capabilities and graces.