ss under the most favorable conditions, and that there is no
state in which she is really happy except that of change. I suppose this
is the truth taught in what has been called the "Myth of the Garden."
Woman is perpetual revolution, and is that element in the world which
continually destroys and re-creates. She is the experimenter and the
suggester of new combinations. She has no belief in any law of eternal
fitness of things. She is never even content with any arrangement of her
own house. The only reason the Mistress could give, when she
rearranged her apartment, for hanging a picture in what seemed the most
inappropriate place, was that it had never been there before. Woman has
no respect for tradition, and because a thing is as it is is sufficient
reason for changing it. When she gets into law, as she has come into
literature, we shall gain something in the destruction of all our vast
and musty libraries of precedents, which now fetter our administration
of individual justice. It is Mandeville's opinion that women are not
so sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken
poetry of nature; being less poetical, and having less imagination, they
are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make less failures in
business. I have noticed the almost selfish passion for their flowers
which old gardeners have, and their reluctance to part with a leaf or a
blossom from their family. They love the flowers for themselves. A woman
raises flowers for their use. She is destruct-ion in a conservatory.
She wants the flowers for her lover, for the sick, for the poor, for the
Lord on Easter day, for the ornamentation of her house. She delights in
the costly pleasure of sacrificing them. She never sees a flower but she
has an intense but probably sinless desire to pick it.

It has been so from the first, though from the first she has been
thwarted by the accidental superior strength of man. Whatever she has
obtained has been by craft, and by the same coaxing which the sun uses
to draw the blossoms out of the apple-trees. I am not surprised to learn
that she has become tired of indulgences, and wants some of the original
rights. We are just beginning to find out the extent to which she
has been denied and subjected, and especially her condition among the
primitive and barbarous races. I have never seen it in a platform of
grievances, but it is true that among the Fijians she is not, unless a
better civilizatio