l have man love her for her own sake; but she loves art
for the sake of man. Very truly, if with an almost sublime effrontery,
she re-christens for her own special purposes the great studies that
fired Raffaelle or Beethoven. She pursues them, she pays for them, not
as arts, but as accomplishments. Their cultivation is the last touch
added at her finishing school ere she makes her bow to the world. She
orders her new duet as she orders her new bonnet, and the two purchases
have precisely the same significance. She drops her piano and her
paint-brush as she drops her coquetries and flirtations, when the fish
is landed and she can throw the bait away. Or, what is worse, she keeps
them alive as little social enjoyments, as reliefs to the tedium of
domestic life, as something which fills up the weary hours when she is
fated to the boredom of rural existence.

A woman of business is counted a strange and remarkable being, we hardly
know why. Looking coolly at the matter, it seems to us that all women
are women of business; that their life is spent over the counter; that
there is nothing in earth or heaven too sacred for their traffic and
their barter. Love, youth, beauty, a British mother reckons them up on
her fingers, and tells you to a fraction their value in the market. And
the pale sentimental being at her side, after flooring one big fellow
with a bit of Chopin, and another with a highly unintelligible verse of
Robert Browning, poses herself shyly and asks through appealing eyes,
"Am I not an aesthetic creature?"

The answer to this question is best read, perhaps, in the musical aspect
of woman. Bold as the assumption sounds, it is quietly assumed that
every woman is naturally musical. Music is the great accomplishment, and
the logic of her schools proves to demonstration that every girl has
fingers and an ear. In a wonderful number of cases the same logic proves
that girls have a voice. Anyhow, the assumption moulds the very course
of female existence. The morning is spent in practicing, and the evening
in airing the results of the practice. There are country-houses where
one only rushes away from the elaborate Thalberg of midnight to be
roused up at dawn by the Battle of Prague on the piano in the
school-room over-head. Still we all reconcile ourselves to this
perpetual rattle, because we know that a musical being has to be
educated into existence, and that a woman is necessarily a musical
being. A glance, indeed, a