expecting to see some
truth that he has never seen before. There is one only other parallel to
this position; and that is the parallel of the life in which we all
began. When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees
stung or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best
out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an
entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say "My
father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously)
the deep delicate truths that flowers smell." No: you believed your
father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a
thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth
to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father, it
was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine, to whom
this book is dedicated. Now, when society is in a rather futile fuss
about the subjection of women, will no one say how much every man owes
to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they alone rule
education until education becomes futile: for a boy is only sent to be
taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything. The real
thing has been done already, and thank God it is nearly always done by
women. Every man is womanised, merely by being born. They talk of the
masculine woman; but every man is a feminised man. And if ever men walk
to Westminster to protest against this female privilege, I shall not
join their procession.

For I remember with certainty this fixed psychological fact; that the
very time when I was most under a woman's authority, I was most full of
flame and adventure. Exactly because when my mother said that ants bit
they did bite, and because snow did come in winter (as she said);
therefore the whole world was to me a fairyland of wonderful
fulfilments, and it was like living in some Hebraic age, when prophecy
after prophecy came true. I went out as a child into the garden, and it
was a terrible place to me, precisely because I had a clue to it: if I
had held no clue it would not have been terrible, but tame. A mere
unmeaning wilderness is not even impressive. But the garden of childhood
was fascinating, exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which
could be found out in its turn. Inch by inch I might discover what was
the object of the ugly shape called a rake; or form some shadowy
conjecture as to why my parents kept a c