their mere
presence, especially when they are graceful or beautiful, that we are
not very severe or even accurate judges of the abstract intellectual
quality of their talk. But a woman cannot feel the indescribable charm
which wins us so easily, and I have sometimes thought that a superior
person of your sex might be aware of certain deficiencies in her sisters
which men very readily overlook. You tell me that you feel embarrassed
in the society of ladies, because they know so little about the subjects
which interest you, and are astonished when you speak about anything
really worth attention. On the other hand, you feel perfectly at ease
with men of ability and culture, and most at your ease with men of the
best ability and the most eminent attainments. What you complain of
chiefly in women seems to be their impatience of varieties of thought
which are unfamiliar to them, and their constant preference for small
topics.

It has long been felt by men that if women could be more freely
initiated into great subjects the interest of general conversation would
be much increased. The difficulty appears to lie in their instinctive
habit of making all questions personal questions. The etiquette of
society makes it quite impossible for men to speak to ladies in the
manner which would be intellectually most profitable to them. We may
not teach because it is pedantic, and we may not contradict, because it
is rude. Most of the great subjects are conventionally held to be
closed, so that it is a sin against good taste to discuss them. In every
house the ladies have a set of fixed convictions of some kind, which it
is not polite in any man to appear to doubt. The consequence of these
conventional rules is that women live in an atmosphere of acquiescence
which makes them intolerant of anything like bold and original thinking
on important subjects. But as the mind always requires free play of some
kind, when all the great subjects are forbidden it will use its activity
in playing about little ones.

For my part I hardly think it desirable for any of us to be incessantly
coping with great subjects, and the ladies are right in taking a lively
interest in the small events around them. But even the small events
would have a deeper interest if they were seen in their true relations
to the great currents of European thought and action. It is probably the
ignorance of these relations which, more than the smallness of the
topics themselves,