tes above all
things to be reminded of her womanhood, which she is constantly engaged in
repressing with Chinese ferocity. Not, as we have hinted, that she thinks
any better of man. Though she dresses as like him as possible, she is very
angry if you suggest that she at all envies him his birthright. And the
humour of the situation, the hopeless dilemma in which she thus places
herself--if it be right to apply the feminine gender!--never occurs to one
whose sense of humour has long been atrophied, perhaps at Girton, or by a
course of sterilising Extension lectures.

Obviously, there is but one course open for the advanced 'woman' in this
dilemma--to evolve a third sex, and this she is doing her best to
achieve, with, I am bound to admit, remarkably speedy success. The result
up to date is the Virago of the Brain, or the Female Frankenstein. The
patentees of this fearsome _tertium quid_ hope to present it to their
patrons, within a very few years, in a form entirely devoid of certain
physiological defects, with which the cussedness of human structure still
uselessly burdens the Virago. As it is, of course, it is by no means
uncommon for the virago to be born without that sentimental organ, the
heart; and it can, therefore, only be a matter of time before she is rid
of what the present writer has been criticised for calling 'her miraculous
womb.' Doubtless, the patentees will then turn their attention to Sir
Thomas Browne's suggested method for the propagation of the race after the
reasonable, civilised, and advanced manner of trees.

But I am warned that I commit impropriety even in naming such matters.
They are 'sacred,'--which means that we ought to be ashamed to mention
them, however reverent our intention. Motherhood, it would appear, is not,
as one had regarded it, a sanctifying privilege, but a shameful
disability, of which not the Immaculate Conception, but the ignoble
service for the 'purification' of women, is the significant symbol. It
behoves not only the unmarried, but the married mothers, so to speak, to
wear farthingales upon the subject, and pretend, with as grave a face as
possible, that babies are really found under cabbages, or sent parcel
post, on application, by her Majesty the Queen.

How long are we to retain the pernicious fallacy that sacredness is a
quality inhering not in the sacred object itself, but in the superstitious
'decencies' that swaddle it, or that we best reverence such sacred object