s the most absolutely shameless that ever existed
anywhere out of Circassia or Georgia. It puts clean out of sight the
notion that women are rational beings as well as animals, or that they
are destined to be the companions of men who are, or ought to be, also
something more than animals. It takes the mind into account only as an
occasionally useful accident of body. The mind ought to be developed a
little, and in such a way as to make the body more piquant and
attractive. Like the candle inside a Chinese lantern, it may serve to
light up and show to advantage the pretty devices outside. But the
outside is the important thing, and the inside only incidental.
Insipidity of mind is perhaps a trifle objectionable, because there are
a few young men of property who dislike insipidity, and who therefore
might be lost from the toils in consequence. It is a crotchet and an
eccentricity in a man to desire a wife with a bright mind, but since
there are such persons, it is just as well to pay a slight attention to
the mind in odd moments when one is not engaged upon the more urgent
business of the body. You don't know what may happen, and it is possible
that the most eligible _parti_ of a season may dislike the idea of
taking a female idiot to wife. Still it would be absurd to change the
entire system of up-bringing for our girls merely because here and there
a man has a distaste for a fool.

The majority of men are incapable of gauging power of intellect and
fineness of character. But the veriest blockhead and simpleton who ever
lounged in a doorway or lisped in Pall Mall can tell a fine woman when
he sees her, and is probably able to find pleasure and hope in the
spectacle. It is these blockheads and simpletons who thus set the mode.
They fix the standard of fashionable female education. Education, or the
astounding modern conception of it, means preparation of girls for the
marriage market. If a girl does not get well married, it were better for
her and for her mother also if she had never been born, or had been cast
with a millstone round her neck into the sea. Whom she marries--whether
a man old enough to be her father, whether a pattern of imbecility,
whether a man of a notoriously debauched character--this matters not a
jot. Only let him have money. This being the conception of marriage, and
marriage being the aim of all sagacious up-bringing, as most men
unhappily are more surely taken on their animal than on their rational