ot a fault in
women, but it is a defect in the eyes of men. Darwin has proved that
the dominant characteristic of male animals is vanity; and what is
to become of that if women show that they can do without us? If the
emancipation of woman had gone on as it began when we were boys, we
should by this time be importing wives for our sons from Timbuctoo or
the Friendly Islands. Happily, women are practical beings who rarely
stray far from the narrow path along which usefulness and pleasure may
still go hand in hand; for considering how much most women do that
is useful, the amount of pleasure they get out of life is perfectly
amazing; and when we try to keep up with them in the chase after
amusement we are surprised at the number of useful things they
accomplish without effort in twenty-four hours.

But, indeed, women are to us very like the moon, which has shown the
earth only one side of herself since the beginning, though she has
watched and studied our world from all its sides through uncounted
ages. We men are alternately delighted, humiliated, and terrified when
women anticipate our wishes, perceive our weaknesses, and detect our
shortcomings, whether we be frisky young colts in the field or sober
stagers plodding along between the matrimonial shafts in harness and
blinkers. We pride ourselves on having the strength to smash the
shafts, shake off the harness, and kick the cart to pieces if we
choose, and there are men who can and do. But the man does not live
who knows what the dickens women are up to when he is going quietly
along the road, as a good horse should. Sometimes they are driving us,
and then there is no mistake about it; and sometimes they are just
sitting in the cart and dozing, and we can tell that they are behind
us by their weight; but very often we are neither driven by them nor
are we dragging them, and we really have not the faintest idea where
they are, so that we are reduced to telling ourselves, with a little
nervousness which we do not care to acknowledge, that it is noble and
beautiful to trust what we love.

A part of the great feminine secret is the concealment of that
independence about which there has been so much talk in our time. As
for suffrage, wherever there is such a thing, the woman who does not
vote always controls far more men's votes than the woman-who goes to
the polls, and has only her own vote to give.

Margaret, the primadonna, did not want to vote for or against
anythin