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emotional life is not much affected by circumstances. With us women it
is otherwise. We really _are_ different women according to the dresses
we wear. We assume a personality in accord with our costume. We laugh,
talk and act at the caprice of purely external circumstances.

Take for instance a woman who wants to confide in another. She will do
it in quite a different way in broad daylight in a drawing-room than in
her little "den" in the gloaming, even if in both cases she happens to
be quite alone with her confidante.

If some women are specially honoured as the recipients of many
confidences from their own sex, I am convinced they owe it more to
physical than moral qualities. As there are some rooms of which the
atmosphere is so cosey and inviting that we feel ourselves at home in
them without a word of welcome, so we find certain women who seem to be
endowed with such receptivity that they invite the confidences of
others.

The history of smiles has never yet been written, simply because the few
women capable of writing it would not betray their sex. As to men, they
are as ignorant on this point as on everything else which concerns
women--not excepting love.

I have conversed with many famous women's doctors, and have pretended to
admire their knowledge, while inwardly I was much amused at their
simplicity. They know how to cut us open and stitch us up again--as
children open their dolls to see the sawdust with which they are stuffed
and sew them up afterwards with a needle and thread. But they get no
further. Yes--a little further perhaps. Possibly in course of time they
begin to discover that women are so infinitely their superiors in
falsehood that their wisest course is to appear once and for all to
believe them then and there....

Women's doctors may be as clever and sly as they please, but they will
never learn any of the things that women confide to each other. It is
inevitable. Between the sexes lies not only a deep, eternal hostility,
but the unfathomable abyss of a complete lack of reciprocal
comprehension.

For instance, all the words in a language will never express what a
smile will express--and between women a smile is like a masonic sign; we
can use them between ourselves without any fear of their being
misunderstood by the other sex.

Smiles are a form of speech with which we alone are conversant. Our
smiles betray our instincts and our burdens; they reflect our virtues
and our inanity.