mpany of their equals--the great sages of antiquity."

Now it is quite clear that this pagan attitude towards sex, this
tendency to enjoy it in its place and leave it there, is one that, more
than anything else, is irritating to women. If, as a German thinker
says, every woman is a courtezan or a mother, it is obvious that the
artists and thinkers who refuse alike the beguilements of the one and
the ironic tenderness of the other, are not people to be "loved."
Dante refuses neither; and he has, further, that peculiar mixture of
harsh strength and touching weakness, which is so especially
appealing to women. They are reluctantly overcome--not without
pleasure--by his fierce authority; and they can play the "little
mother" to his weakness. The maternal instinct is as ironical as it is
tender. It smiles at the high ideals or the eccentric child it pets, but it
would not have him different. What a woman does not like, whether
she is mother or courtezan, is that other kind of irony, the irony of
the philosopher, which undermines both her maternal feeling and
her passionate caresses.

Women, too, even quite good women, have the stress of the sexual
difference constantly before them. Indeed it may be said that the
class of women who are least sex-conscious are those who have
habitually to sell themselves. It all matters so little then!

How fiercely is the interest of the most virtuous aroused, when any
question of a love affair is rumored. In this sense every woman is a
born "go-between." Sex is not with them a thing apart, an exciting
volcanic thing, liable to mad outbursts, to weird perversions, but
often completely forgotten. It is never completely forgotten. It is
diffused. It is everywhere. It lurks in a thousand innocent gestures
and intimations. The savage purity of an Artemis is no real
exception. Sex is a thing too pressing to be dallied with. It is all or
nothing.

One cannot play with fire. When we make observations of this kind
we do not derogate from the charm or dignity of women. It is no
aspersion upon them. They did not ask to have it so. It is so.

Domestic life as the European nations have evolved it is a queer
compromise. Its restraints weigh heavily, in alternate discord, upon
both sexes.

Masculine depravity rebels against it, and the whole modern
feministic movement shakes it to the base. It remains to be seen
whether Nature will admit of any satisfactory readjustment.

Certainly, as far as over