Women, who know their own hearts, have little difficulty in reading
others'.
(1) It is (perhaps) highly unfortunate that to this word is attached a
two-fold signification.
(2) Though, as Mr. Grant Allen has endeavored to show, this is a
scientific a method as any.
* * *
No units of measurement yet devised are adequate for the computation of
the power wielded by a beautiful woman.
* * *
That is a significant fact, and probably, could we fathom all the
profundities and unravel all the entanglements of the relations between
the sexes, as deep and as intricate as significant, that no woman thinks
a man can pay her a higher compliment than to wish to make her his own.
For though
Woman thinks man her ultimate aim and desire, Nature knows that man is
but the stepping-stone to the child. In the end woman agrees with
Nature. We may go farther, and say
Women are nearer the eternal laws than are men. Men govern themselves by
the laws they themselves make. Women are lawless. Laws are for the
temporal, the fleeting; for a given individual in a given society; for a
particular race in a particular clime. Such laws are obeyed by women
only under compulsion. They, more far-seeing than men, instinctively
peer far beyond the ephemeral rules manufactured by men, into the realm
of laws eternal and immutable; these she obeys implicitly,
unquestioningly--much to man's amazement--and, it may be, his
mortification; for he sees that she is freer than he. This is why,
For the man she truly loves a woman will sacrifice everything
--everything. The same generous sentiment cannot by any means be
attributed to man.
* * *
Both the wise man and the wise woman--but here I am reminded of the
recipe for hare soup.
* * *
Between the sexes there is in reality but one link--the link amatory.
And
So long as Nature maintains two sexes, so long will men and women hug,
yet chafe under, that slender but invisible bond.
Not even Cupid and Psyche avoided a misunderstanding--in spite of the
devotion of the other. And,
If men and women differ in matters amatory, it is because men and women
have trodden different evolutionary paths:
The man, given up to the chase (for pelts or pelf) and careful of his
status in the tribe, thinks only of himself and the present;
The woman, her sole care the nurture of her offspring, thinks only of her
progeny, and the future. But since