disasters. Relying too much on the offensive weapons of
their acute angles instead of the defensive organs of good sense and
seasonable simulation, these reckless creatures too often neglect the
prescribed construction of the women's apartments, or irritate their
wives by ill-advised expressions out of doors, which they refuse
immediately to retract. Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for literal
truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which the more
judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The result is
massacre; not, however, without its advantages, as it eliminates the
more brutal and troublesome of the Isosceles; and by many of our
Circles the destructiveness of the Thinner Sex is regarded as one among
many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population,
and nipping Revolution in the bud.

Yet even in our best regulated and most approximately Circular families
I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high as with you in
Spaceland. There is peace, in so far as the absence of slaughter may
be called by that name, but there is necessarily little harmony of
tastes or pursuits; and the cautious wisdom of the Circles has ensured
safety at the cost of domestic comfort. In every Circular or Polygonal
household it has been a habit from time immemorial--and now has become
a kind of instinct among the women of our higher classes--that the
mothers and daughters should constantly keep their eyes and mouths
towards their husband and his male friends; and for a lady in a family
of distinction to turn her back upon her husband would be regarded as a
kind of portent, involving loss of STATUS. But, as I shall soon shew,
this custom, though it has the advantage of safety, is not without its
disadvantages.

In the house of the Working Man or respectable Tradesman--where the
wife is allowed to turn her back upon her husband, while pursuing her
household avocations--there are at least intervals of quiet, when the
wife is neither seen nor heard, except for the humming sound of the
continuous Peace-cry; but in the homes of the upper classes there is
too often no peace. There the voluble mouth and bright penetrating eye
are ever directed towards the Master of the household; and light itself
is not more persistent than the stream of feminine discourse. The tact
and skill which suffice to avert a Woman's sting are unequal to the
task of stopping a Woman's mouth; and as the wife has a