rength shall come forth sweetness." There is the lioness behind the
rarest honey.

Like others of my calling, I had seen the best and the worst and the
most of women. The pathological view of that complex subject is the
most unfortunate which a man can well have. The habit of classifying a
woman as neuralgic, hysteric, dyspeptic, instead of unselfish,
intellectual, high-minded, is not a wholesome one for the classifier.
Something of the abnormal condition of the _clientele_ extends to the
adviser. A physician who has a healthy and natural view of women has
the making of a great man in him.

I was not a great man. I was only a successful lector; more conscious
in those days of the latter fact, and less of the former, be it
admitted, than I am now. A man's avocation may be at once his ruin and
his exculpation. I do not know whether I was more self-confident or
even more wilful than other men to whom is given the autocracy of our
profession, and the dependence of women which accompanies it. I should
not wish to have the appearance of saying an unmanly thing, if I add
that this dependence had wearied me.

It is more likely to be true that I differed from most other men in
this: that in all my life I have known but one woman whom I loved, or
wished to make my wife. I was forty-five years old before I saw her.

Who of us has not felt at the Play, the strong allegorical power in the
coming of the first actress before the house? The hero may pose, the
clown dance, the villain plot, the warrior, the king, the merchant, the
page, fuddle the attention for the nonce: it is a dreary business; it
is like parsing poetry; it is a grammatical duty; the Play could not,
it seems, go on without these superfluities. We listen, weary, regret,
find fault, and acquire an aversion, when lo! upon the monotonous,
masculine scene, some slender creature, shining, all white gown and
yellow hair and soft arms and sweet curves comes gliding--and, hush!
with the Everwomanly, the Play begins.

I do not think this feeling is one peculiar to our sex alone; I have
heard women express the same in the strongest terms.

So, I have sometimes thought it is with the coming of the Woman upon
the stage of a man's life. If the scenes have shifted for a while too
long, monopolized by the old dismal male actors whose trick and pose
and accent he knows so well and understands too easily,--and if, then,
half-through the drama, late and longed-for, tar