r of that answer will be.' One can imagine that this was written
with a view to being read at the breakfast-tables of Villadom; but men
and women of the world, whose experience is not confined to Villadom,
nor their opinions of life coloured by the requirements of the Young
Person, will recognise the undoubted truth of Mrs Craigie's statements.
Whilst agreeing that the state of things between the sexes which she
describes is a true one, I venture respectfully to differ as to women's
motive for this 'excess of generosity.' There is an enormous amount of
wonderful unselfishness among women, but it does not expend itself in
this direction, in my opinion. Rather is the motive a passionate desire
for their own enjoyment, the gratification of their own vanity by
pleasing the opposite sex, often at the cost of their own self-respect.
H. B. Marriott-Watson takes the same view in a subsequent letter, where
he says: 'Women's unselfishness does not extend to the region of love.
The sex attraction is practically inconsistent with altruism, and the
measure of renunciation is inversely the measure of affection. This is
the order which Nature has established, and it is no use trying to expel
her. A woman may lay down her life for the man she loves, but she will
not surrender him to a rival.'

Another letter of interest came from Miss Helen Mathers, who stated that
'all women should marry, but no men!'--the advantages of the conjugal
state being, in her opinion, entirely on the woman's side.

At this point appeared Mr Meredith's contribution to the discussion in
the less authoritative form of an interview--not a letter or article,
as, after this lapse of time, so many people seem to imagine. On
re-reading this interview recently, I was struck with Mr Meredith's
peculiarly old-fashioned ideas about women. Where the woman question
was concerned the clock of his observation seems to have stopped many
decades ago.

'The fault at the bottom of the business,' he affirms, 'is that women
are so uneducated, so unready. Men too often want a slave, and
frequently think they have got one, not because the woman has not often
got more sense than her husband, but because she is so inarticulate, not
educated enough to give expression to her real ideas and feelings.'

This was before the vogue of the suffragettes, but it is a sufficiently
surprising statement for 1904. He continues: 'It is a question to my
mind whether a young girl, married, say, at