se,
the revolutionist, half nude of body and wholly nude of mind, each in
their turn have given their sign and seal to their especial century, for
better or for worse. The nineteenth century has some touch of all, but
its own novelty of production is the female speculator.

The woman who, breathless, watches _la hausse_ and _la baisse_; whose
favour can only be won by some hint in advance of the newspapers; whose
heart is locked to all save golden keys; who starts banks, who concocts
companies, who keeps a broker, as in the eighteenth century a woman kept
a monkey, and in the twelfth a knight; whose especial art is to buy in
at the right moments, and to sell out in the nick of time; who is great
in railways and canals, and new bathing-places, and shares in
fashionable streets; who chooses her lovers, thinking of concessions,
and kisses her friends for sake of the secrets they may betray from
their husbands--what other centuries may say of her who can tell?

The Hotel Rambouillet thought itself higher than heaven, and the
generation of Catherine of Sienna believed her deal planks the sole
highway to the throne of God.

* * *

Proud women, and sensitive women, take hints and resent rebuffs, and so
exile themselves from the world prematurely and haughtily. They abdicate
the moment they see that any desire their discrowning. Abdication is
grand, no doubt. But possession is more profitable. "A well-bred dog
does not wait to be kicked out," says the old see-saw. But the well-bred
dog thereby turns himself into the cold, and leaves the crumbs from
under the table to some other dog with less good-breeding and more
worldly wisdom. The sensible thing to do is to stay where you like best
to be; stay there with tooth and claw ready and a stout hide on which
cudgels break. People, after all, soon get tired of kicking a dog that
never will go.

High-breeding was admirable in days when the world itself was high-bred.
But those days are over. The world takes high-breeding now as only a
form of insolence.

* * *

"To your poetic temper life is a vast romance, beautiful and terrible,
like a tragedy of AEschylus. You stand amidst it entranced, like a child
by the beauty and awe of a tempest. And all the while the worldly-wise,
to whom the tempest is only a matter of the machineries of a theatre--of
painted clouds, electric lights, and sheets of copper--the world-wise
govern the storm as they