Woman is all that
poets have said of her, and all that poets can never say:

Always incredible hath seemed the rose,
And inconceivable the nightingale--

and the poet's adoration of her is but the articulate voice of man's
love since the beginning, a love which is as mysterious as she herself
is a mystery.

However some may try to analyse man's love for woman, to explain it, or
explain it away, belittle it, nay, even resent and befoul it, it remains
an unaccountable phenomenon, a "mystery we make darker with a name."
Biology, cynically pointing at certain of its processes, makes the
miracle rather more miraculous than otherwise. Musical instruments are
no explanation of music. "Is it not strange that sheep's guts should
hale souls out of men's bodies?" says Benedick, in _Much Ado About
Nothing_, commenting on Balthazar's music. But they do, for all that,
though no one considers sheep's gut the explanation. To cry "sex" and to
talk of nature's mad preoccupation with the species throws no light on
the matter, and robs it of no whit of its magic. The rainbow remains a
rainbow, for all the sciences. And woman, with or without the suffrage,
stenographer or princess, is of the rainbow. She is beauty made flesh
and dwelling amongst us, and whatever the meaning and message of beauty
may be, such is the meaning of woman on the earth--her meaning, at all
events, for men. That is, she is the embodiment, more than any other
creature, of that divine something, whatever it may be, behind matter,
that spiritual element out of which all proceeds, and which mysteriously
gives its solemn, lovely and tragic significance to our mortal day.

If you tell some women this of themselves, they will smile at you. Men
are such children. They are so simple. Dear innocents, how easily they
are fooled! A little make-up, a touch of rouge, a dash of henna--and you
are an angel. Some women seem really to think this; for, naturally, they
know nothing of their own mystery, and imagine that it resides in a few
feminine tricks, the superficial cleverness with which some of them know
how to make the most of the strange something about them which they
understand even less than men understand it.

Other women indeed resent man's religious attitude toward them as
sentimental, old-fashioned. They prefer to be regarded merely as
fellow-men. To show consciousness of their sex is to risk offence, and
to busy one's eyes with their magnifice