n and of
a woman have been known to be cured by it.

* * *

Men and women do not love before they are thirty, men especially. Until
then it is little more than rehearsing. Fortunate are those who retain
for the play the same company they had engaged for the rehearsal.

CHAPTER X

WOMAN'S MISSION IN THIS WORLD

Naturalists make little difference between women and the other females
of the animal kingdom: they declare that the mission of woman is to be a
mother. Napoleon I., who was a naturalist, being asked to give a
definition of the best woman, answered: 'The one who bears most
children.' And as for him man was mere 'cannon flesh,' I am surprised he
did not say, 'The one who bears most boys.'

Moralists are kinder to women; they go so far as to grant that woman's
mission is twofold: that she is intended to be a wife and a mother; that
she is to be the guardian of the hearth, submissive and devoted to man,
her lord and master; to look after her household, and be absorbed by her
duties toward her husband and children.

No sinecure, this mission of woman, as you see--no joke either; but
moralists have no sense of humour--not a particle of it.

No doubt this double role of wife and mother is most respectable; it is
even sacred; but woman's nature demands something else. To restrict her
circle of activity and influence to her family is to misappreciate her
many faculties, her aspirations, her feelings, which, like those of men,
are entitled to respect; it amounts to not recognising that her mission
is not only familial, but social also.

I will not dwell on the part she is called upon to play in the family as
wife and mother. We men all know it, whether we are husbands or sons;
but we have also to consider what the role of woman is in that society
of which she is the great civilizing element as well as the greatest
ornament.

The most noble part that has been allotted to woman is that of the
flower in the vegetable kingdom. This role consists in throwing a spell
over the world, in making life more refined and poetical--in a word, in
spreading fragrance around her and imparting it to all who come in
contact with her. A wag once said that but for the women men could have
hoped for Paradise. Good! But what about this world? Is not woman the
direct or indirect motive for all our actions? Is she not the embodiment
of the beautiful, and therefore the mother of Art?

If she is sometimes the cause of a