of eating; but religion has never despised it.
When we look at a firm, fat, white cliff of chalk at Dover, I do not
suggest that we should desire to eat it; that would be highly abnormal.
But I really mean that we should think it good to eat; good for some
one else to eat. For, indeed, some one else is eating it; the grass that
grows upon its top is devouring it silently, but, doubtless, with an
uproarious appetite.

Simmons and the Social Tie

It is a platitude, and none the less true for that, that we need to
have an ideal in our minds with which to test all realities. But it is
equally true, and less noted, that we need a reality with which to test
ideals. Thus I have selected Mrs. Buttons, a charwoman in Battersea, as
the touchstone of all modern theories about the mass of women. Her name
is not Buttons; she is not in the least a contemptible nor entirely a
comic figure. She has a powerful stoop and an ugly, attractive face, a
little like that of Huxley--without the whiskers, of course. The courage
with which she supports the most brutal bad luck has something quite
creepy about it. Her irony is incessant and inventive; her practical
charity very large; and she is wholly unaware of the philosophical use
to which I put her.

But when I hear the modern generalization about her sex on all sides I
simply substitute her name, and see how the thing sounds then. When on
the one side the mere sentimentalist says, "Let woman be content to
be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of social art and domestic
ornament," then I merely repeat it to myself in the "other form," "Let
Mrs. Buttons be content to be dainty and exquisite, a protected piece of
social art, etc." It is extraordinary what a difference the substitution
seems to make. And on the other hand, when some of the Suffragettes say
in their pamphlets and speeches, "Woman, leaping to life at the trumpet
call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp
the sceptre of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought"--in
order to understand such a sentence I say it over again in the amended
form: "Mrs. Buttons, leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and
Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp the sceptre of
empire and the firebrand of speculative thought." Somehow it sounds
quite different. And yet when you say Woman I suppose you mean the
average woman; and if most women are as capable and critical and morally
sound as