rough, pitiless, degrading circumstances, may displace, eat out, rub
off the delicacy of a soul, may change its texture to unnatural
coarseness and scatter ashes for beauty, women do exist, victims rather
than culprits, coarse against their nature, hard, material, grasping,
the saddest sight humanity can see. Such a woman can accept coarse
men. They may come courting on all fours, and she will not be shocked.
But women in the natural state wish men to stand godlike erect, to
tread majestically, and live delicately. Women do not often make an ado
about this. They talk it over among themselves, and take men as they
are. They quietly soften them down, and smooth them out, and polish
them up, and make the best of them, and simply and sedulously shut
their eyes and make believe there isn't any worst, or reason it
away,--a great deal more than I should think they would. But if you
see the qualities that a woman spontaneously loves, the expression, the
tone, the bearing that thoroughly satisfies her self-respect, that not
only secures her acquiescence, but arouses her enthusiasm and commands
her abdication, crucify the flesh, and read Coventry Patmore. Not that
he is the world's great poet, nor Arthur Vaughan the ideal man; but
this I do mean: that the delicacy, the spirituality of his love, the
scrupulous respectfulness of his demeanor, his unfeigned inward
humility, as far removed from servility on the one side as from
assumption on the other, and less the opponent than the offspring of
self-respect, his thorough gentleness, guilelessness, deference, his
manly, unselfish homage, are such qualities, and such alone, as lead
womanhood captive. Listen to me, you rattling, roaring, rollicking
Ralph Roister Doisters, you calm, inevitable Gradgrinds, as smooth, as
sharp, as bright as steel, and as soulless, and you men, whoever,
whatever, and wherever you are, with fibres of rope and nerves of wire,
there is many and many a woman who tolerates you because she finds you,
but there is nothing in her that ever goes out to seek you. Be not
deceived by her placability. "Here he is," she says to herself, "and
something must be done about it. Buried under Ossa and Pelion
somewhere he must be supposed to have a soul, and the sooner he is dug
into the sooner it will be exhumed." So she digs. She would never
have made you, nor of her own free-will elected you; but being made,
such as you are, and on her hands in one way or anothe