greedy as to helpless things. And
heavens, how the cat likes to be petted and generally approved! It likes
love, but not all the time. And it likes to choose the people it
consorts with. It is a predatory creature, also, and likes to be neat
and tidy, while it sticks to its old trousers with a love that passeth
understanding--there, I've slipped up, but you know what I mean.

Now women are like dogs, really. They love like dogs, a little
insistently. And they like to fetch and carry, and come back wistfully
after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket. And after
three years or so of marriage they learn to enjoy the bones of
conversation and sometimes even to go to the mat with them. (Oh, Irvin,
I know that's dreadful!) Really, the only resemblance between men and
dogs is that they both rather run to feet in early life.

This fondness for old clothes and old chairs and familiar places is
something women find hard to understand. Yet it is simple enough. It is
compounded of comfort and loyalty.

Men are curiously loyal. They are loyal to ancient hats and disreputable
old friends and to some women. But they are always loyal to each other.

This, I maintain, is the sole reason for alluding to them as the
stronger and superior sex. They are stronger. They are superior. They
are as strong as a trades union, only more so. They stand together
against the rest of the world. Women do not. They have no impulse toward
solidarity. They fight a sort of guerilla warfare, each sniping from
behind her own tree. They are the greatest example of the weakness of
unorganized force in the world.

But this male trades union is not due to affection. It is two-fold. It
is a survival from the days when men united for defense. Women didn't
unite. They didn't need to, and they couldn't have, anyhow. When the
cave man went away to fight or to do the family marketing, he used to
roll a large bowlder against the entrance to his stone mansion, and thus
discouraged afternoon callers of the feminine sex who would otherwise
have dropped in for a cup of tea. Then he took away the rope ladder and
cut off the telephone, and went away with a heart at peace to join the
other males.

They would do it now, if they could.

But the real reason for their sex solidarity is their terrible
alikeness. They understand each other. Knowing their own weaknesses,
they know the other fellow's. So they stand by each other, sometimes out
of sympathy, an