n do run up milliners' bills, but men boast of
never paying their tailors. And if sometimes women do not discharge the
lost bet, it is largely because a tradition of protection and patronage
has laid down that women need not pay their bets. Besides, women usually
pay their losses, while several men have not yet discharged their debts
of honor to me. It is a matter of honesty, and I think the criminal
returns for the United States would produce the same evidence as those
for England and Wales. In 1913 there were tried at Assizes for offences
against property 1616 men and 122 women. The records of Quarter Sessions
and of the courts of Summary Jurisdiction yield the same result, an
enormous majority of male offenders,--though there be more women than
men in England and Wales! And yet, in the face of such official figures,
of the evidence of every employer, man cherishes a belief in woman's
dishonesty! One reason, no doubt, is that woman's emotional nature leads
her, when she is criminal, to criminality of an aggravated kind. She
then justifies Pope's misogynist lines:

"O woman, woman! When to ill thy mind
Is bent, all hell contains no fouler fiend."

Most men, however, have abandoned the case against woman's dishonesty
and confine themselves to describing her as a liar, forgetting that they
generally dislike the truth when it comes from a woman's lips, and
always when it reflects upon their own conduct. For centuries man has
asked that woman should flatter, but also that she should tell the
truth: such a confusion of demands leads the impartial mind to the
conclusion that vanity cannot be a monopoly of the female. But it is
quite true that woman does not always cherish truth so well as man. The
desire for truth is intellectual, not emotional. Truth is a cold
bed-fellow, as might be expected of one who rose from a well. And among
women cases of disinterested lying are not uncommon. Here is Case 16:

An elderly woman talked at length about not having received insurance
papers, and made a great disturbance. It later appeared that she had not
insured. On another occasion she informed the household that her
son-in-law had been cabled to from South Africa to come and visit his
dying mother. It was proved that no cable had been sent.

I have a number of cases of this kind, but this is the most curious. I
suspect that this sort of lying is traceable to a need for romance and
drama in a colorless life. It springs from the w