e children of all ages. She boasts
of how good a marksman she is--she does not call herself markswoman--and
how she can hit right and left, and bring down both birds flying. When
she drinks wine she holds the stem of the glass between her first two
fingers, hollows her underlip, and tosses it off, throwing her head well
back--she would disdain the ladylike sip or the closer gesture of
ordinary women. She is great in cheese and bitter beer, in claret cup
and still champagne, but she despises the puerilities of sweets or of
effervescing wines. She rounds her elbows and turns her wrist outward,
as men round their elbows and turn their wrists outward. She is fond of
carpentry, she says, and boasts of her powers with the plane and saw;
for charms to her watch-chain she wears a corkscrew, a gimlet, a big
knife, and a small foot-rule; and in entire contrast with the intensely
womanly woman, who uses the tips of her fingers only, the mannish woman
when she does anything uses the whole hand, and if she had to thread a
needle would thread it as much by her palm as by her fingers. All of
which is affectation--from first to last affectation; a mere assumption
of virile fashions utterly inharmonious to the whole being, physical
and mental, of a woman.

Then there is the affectation of the woman who has taken propriety and
orthodoxy under her special protection, and who regards it as a personal
insult when her friends and acquaintances go beyond the exact limits of
her mental sphere. This is the woman who assumes to be the antiseptic
element in society, who makes believe that without her the world and
human nature would go to the dogs, and plunge headlong into the abyss of
sin and destruction forthwith; and that not all the grand heroism of
man, not all his thought and energy and high endeavor and patient
seeking after truth, would serve his turn or the world's if she did not
spread her own petty preserving nets, and mark out the boundary lines
within which she would confine the range of thought and speculation. She
knows that this assumption of spiritual beadledom is mere affectation,
and that other minds have as much right to their own boundary lines as
she claims for herself; but it seems to her pretty to assume that woman
generally is the consecrated beadle of thought and morality, and that
she, of all women, is most specially consecrated.

As an offshoot of this kind stands the affectation of simplicity--the
woman whose mental