passing sweet to her. I think there is
no yearning more intense than that of a clever woman for the triumphs of
mere beauty. She would give all her powers of intellect for the smallest
tribute to personal and feminine charm. What is your verdict, Mrs.
Temperley?"

Mrs. Temperley supposed that clever women had something of human nature
in them, and valued overmuch what they did not possess.

Professor Theobald had perhaps looked for an answer that would have
betrayed more of the speaker's secret feelings.

"It is the fashion, I know," he said, "to regard woman as an enigma.
Now, without professing any unusual acuteness, I believe that this is a
mistake. Woman is an enigma certainly, because she is human, but that
ends it. Her conditions have tended to cultivate in her the power of
dissimulation, and the histrionic quality, just as the peaceful ilex
learns to put forth thorns if you expose it to the attacks of devouring
cattle. It is this instinct to develop thorns in self-defence, and yet
to live a little behind the prickly outposts, that leads to our notion
of mystery in woman's nature. Let a man's subsistence and career be
subject to the same powers and chances as the success of a woman's life
now hangs on, and see whether he too does not become a histrionic
enigma."

Professor Fortescue observed that the clergy, at times, developed
qualities called feminine, because in some respects their conditions
resembled those of women.

Theobald assented enthusiastically to this view. He had himself entered
the church as a young fellow (let not Mrs. Temperley look so
inconsiderately astonished), and had left it on account of being unable
to conscientiously subscribe to its tenets.

"But not before I had acquired some severe training in that sort of
strategy which is incumbent upon women, in the conduct of their lives.
Whatever I might privately think or feel, my office required that I
should only express that which would be more or less grateful to my
hearers. (Is not this the woman's case, in almost every position in
life?) Even orthodoxy must trip it on tiptoe; there was always some
prejudice, some susceptibility to consider. What was frankness in others
was imprudence in me; other men's minds might roam at large; mine was
tethered, if not in its secret movements, at least in its utterance; and
it is a curious and somewhat sinister law of Nature, that perpetual
denial of utterance ends by killing the power or the feelin