ves half a dozen lectures a week,
and has leisure to enjoy the society of her husband and children, and
to devote to her own study and life of thought; it is she who wrings his
heart. It is not the woman, who, on hands and knees, at tenpence a day,
scrubs the floors of the public buildings, or private dwellings, that
fills him with anguish for womanhood: that somewhat quadrupedal posture
is for him truly feminine, and does not interfere with his ideal of the
mother and child-bearer; and that, in some other man's house, or perhaps
his own, while he and the wife he keeps for his pleasures are visiting
concert or entertainment, some weary woman paces till far into the night
bearing with aching back and tired head the fretful, teething child
he brought into the world, for a pittance of twenty or thirty pounds
a year, does not distress him. But that the same woman by work in an
office should earn one hundred and fifty pounds, be able to have a
comfortable home of her own, and her evening free for study or pleasure,
distresses him deeply. It is not the labour, or the amount of labour,
so much as the amount of reward that interferes with his ideal of the
eternal womanly; he is as a rule quite contented that the women of the
race should labour for him, whether as tea-pickers or washerwomen, or
toilers for the children he brings into the world, provided the reward
they receive is not large, nor in such fields as he might himself at any
time desire to enter.

When master and ass, drawing a heavy burden between them, have climbed
a steep mountain range together; clambering over sharp rocks and across
sliding gravel where no water is, and herbage is scant; if, when they
were come out on the top of the mountain, and before them stretch broad,
green lands, and through wide half-open gates they catch the glimpse of
trees waving, and there comes the sound of running waters, if then, the
master should say to his ass, "Good beast of mine, lie down! I can push
the whole burden myself now: lie down here; lie down, my creature; you
have toiled enough; I will go on alone!" then it might be even the beast
would whisper (with that glimpse through the swinging gates of the green
fields beyond)--"Good master, we two have climbed this mighty mountain
together, and the stones have cut my hoofs as they cut your feet.
Perhaps, if when we were at the foot you had found out that the burden
was two heavy for me, and had then said to me, 'Lie down, my be