phere she brings with her is
peculiar, you cannot tell how. It is neither warm nor chill, neither
moist nor dry; but it is repressive. You do not move in it with
natural freedom, although you feel nothing that could be called
_gene_. Her manner is generally sweet, sometimes even caressing, and
you feel flattered and elevated as you meet her approving eye. But you
cannot get into it. There is a glassy surface, beautiful but hard, of
which you can make nothing, and presently you feel a kind of
strangeness come over you, as if you were not looking into the eye of
a creature of your own kind. What you miss is sympathy.

It is to her want of sympathy the woman of the world owes her
position. The same deficiency is indispensable in the other
individuals--such as a great monarch, or a great general--who rule the
fate of mankind; but with this difference, that in them it is partial
and limited, and in her universal. In them, it bears relation to their
trade or mission; in her, it is a peculiarity of her general nature.
She is accused of inhumanity; of sporting with the feelings of those
about her, and rending, when they interfere with her plans, the
strings of the heart as ruthlessly as if they were fiddlestrings. But
all that is nonsense. She does not, it is true, ignore the existence
of strings and feelings; on the contrary, they are in her eyes a great
fact, without which she could do nothing. But her theory is, that they
are merely a superficial net-work surrounding the character, the
growth of education and other circumstances, and that they may be
twisted, broken, and fastened anew at pleasure by skilful fingers. No,
she is not inhumane. She works for others' good and her own greatness.
Sighs and tears may be the result of her operations; but so are they
of the operations of the beneficent surgeon. She dislikes giving pain,
and comforts and sustains the patient to the best of her power; but at
the most, she knows sighs are but wind, and tears but water, and so
she does her duty.

Although without sympathy, the woman of the world has great
sensitiveness. She sits in the room like a spider, with her web
fitting as closely to the whole area as the carpet; and she feels the
slightest touch upon the slightest filament. So do the company: not
understandingly like her, but instinctively and unconsciously, like a
fly who only knows that somehow or other he is not at freedom. The
thing that holds him is as soft and glossy and th