eral--all
other people--are as inexperienced--as they look. If a man speaks on a
subject at all in their presence, they assume he speaks
autobiographically. These people are getting thicker every year. One
can't go anywhere without finding them standing around with a kind of
"How-do-you-know?" and "Did-it-happen-to-you?" air every time a man says
something he knows by--well--by seeing it--perfectly plain seeing it.
One doesn't need to stand up to one's neck in experience, in a perfect
muck of experience, in order to know things, in order to know they are
there. People who are experienced within an inch of their lives,
submerged in experience, until all you can see of them is a tired look,
are always calling out to the man who sees a thing as he is going
by--sees it, I mean, with his mind; sees it without having to put his
feet in it--they are always calling out to him to come back and be with
them, and know life, as they call it, and duck under to Experience. Now,
to say nothing of living with such persons, it is almost impossible to
talk with them. It isn't safe even to philosophise when they are around.
If a man ventures the assertion in their presence that what a woman
loves in a lover is complete subjugation they argue that either he is a
fool and is asserting what he has not experienced, or he is still more
of one and has experienced it. The idea that a man may have several
principles around him that he has not used yet does not occur to them.
The average amateur mother, when she belongs to this type, becomes a
perfect bigot toward a maiden aunt who advances, perhaps, some harmless
little Froebel idea. She swears by the shibboleth of experience, and
every new baby she has makes her more disagreeable to people who have
not had babies. The only way to get acquainted with her is to have a
baby. She assumes that a motherless woman has a motherless mind. The
idea that a rich and bountiful womanhood, which is saving its motherhood
up, which is free from the absorption and the haste, keenly observant
and sympathetic, may come to a kind of motherly insight, distinctly the
result of not being experienced, does not occur to her. The art of
getting the result--the spirit of experience, without paying all the
cost of the experience itself--needs a good word spoken for it nowadays.
Some one has yet to point out the value and power of what might be
called The Maiden-Aunt Attitude toward Life. The world has had thousands
of experi