d occasionally out of fear. You see, it is not only a
trades union, it is a mutual benefit society. Its only constitution is
the male Golden Rule--"You stick by me and I'll stick by you." "We men
must stick together."

I'll confess that with a good many women it is, "You stick me and I'll
stick you."

But that solidarity, primarily offensive and defensive, has also an
element in it that women seldom understand, and almost always resent.
Not very many years ago a play ran in New York without a woman in the
cast or connected with the story. There is one running very successfully
now in Paris. Both were written by men, naturally. Women cannot conceive
of the drama of life without women in it. But men can.

The plain truth is that normal women need men all the time, but that
normal men need women only a part of the time. They like to have them to
go back to, but they do not need them in sight, or even within telephone
call. There are some hours of every day when you could repeat a man's
wife's name to him through a megaphone, and he would have to come a long
ways back, from golf or pool or the ticker or the stock news, to
remember who she is.

When a man gets up a golf foursome he wants four men. When a woman does
it, she wants three.

It is this ability to be happy without her that a woman never
understands. Her lack of understanding of it causes a good bit of
unhappiness, too. Men are gregarious; they like to be together. But
women gauge them by their own needs, and form dark surmises about these
harmless meetings, which are as innocuous and often as interesting as
the purely companionable huddlings of sheep in pasture.

Women play bridge together to fill in the time until the five-thirty is
due. Men play bridge because they like to beat the other fellow.

Mind you, I am not saying there are not strong and fine affections among
women. If it comes to that, there is often deeper devotion, perhaps,
than among men. But I am saying that women do not care for women as a
sex, as men care for men. Men will die to save other men. Women will
sacrifice themselves ruthlessly for children, but not for other women.
Queer, isn't it?

Yet not so queer. Women want marriage and a home. They should. And there
are more women than men. Even before the war there was, in Europe and
America, an extra sixth woman for every five men, and the sixth woman
brings competition. She bulls the market, and makes feminine sex
solidarity impossibl