no jury-women or she
sergeants.

As to the manners of Englishwomen, they are, like the manners of other
women, good, bad, and indifferent. And chiefly they are indifferent;
being in this particular also like others, especially of the Teutonic
races; which races, my readers may like to be reminded, are the Deutsch
(which we call German), the Hollanders, the Anglo-Saxon (or better, the
English), and the Scandinavians (Swedes, Norsemen, Danes, and
Icelanders). The average manners of these peoples, even of the women
among them, are on the whole truly indifferent. They are not coarse, but
as surely they are not polished. Manner, however, is a very different
thing from manners; and in manner Englishwomen, from the highest class
to the lowest, are all more or less charming--strong-minded women and
lodging-house keepers being of course excepted. This charm, like all
traits and effects of manner, is not easy to describe; but it left upon
me at this time, as it had left before, an impression of its being the
outcoming of an intense consciousness of womanhood, and with this a
feeling of modest but very firm self-respect. The most intelligent
Englishwoman, even in her most exalted moments, never seems to resolve
herself into a bare intelligence. Her mind is always clad in woman's
flesh; and her body thinks. Thus conscious of her own womanhood, she
keeps you conscious of it, not merely by the facts that her hair is
long, her face beardless, and that her body (in the evening the lower
part of it at least) is covered with voluminous and marvellous
apparel--in a word, not merely by outer show.

All this is but the outward sign; and it might exist--as it so often
does, I shall not say where--in women, without the least of that grace,
not of movement or of speech, or even of thought, but of moral
condition, which is to me the chiefest charm in woman. How often have I
sat by one of such women talking--no, talked at (for it reduces me to
silence)--in such a splendid and overwhelming manner, and with such a
superior consciousness of intellectuality, that I could not but think
that except for the silk and the lace, and the lack of moustaches, and
the evident expectation of a compliment, I might as well have been
talking with a man (only a man would have said more with less fuss), and
that I longed for the companionship of some pretty, well-bred ignoramus,
whose head was full only of common sense, and whose soul as well as
whose body was of