by a prurient prudish conspiracy of silence concerning it?

Then there is, it would also appear, a particular indignity, from the new
virago's point of view, in the assumption that a woman's beauty is one of
her great missions, or the supposition that she takes any such pride in it
herself as man has from time immemorial supposed. No sensible woman, we
have been indignantly assured, ever plays at Narcissus with her mirror.
That all women find such pleasure in their reflections no one would think
of saying. How could they, poor things? One is quite ready to admit that
probably our virago looks in her glass as seldom as possible. But all
sensible women that are beautiful as well should take joy in their own
charms, if they have any feelings of gratitude towards the supernal powers
which might have made them--well, more advanced than beautiful, and given
them a head full of cheap philosophy instead of a transfiguring head of
hair.

No one wants a woman to be silly and vain about her beauty. But vanity and
conceit are qualities that exist in people quite independently of their
gifts and graces. The ugly and stupid are perhaps more often conceited
than the beautiful or the clever,--vain, it would appear, of their very
ugliness and stupidity. Besides, is it any worse for a woman to be vain of
her looks than of her brains?--and the advanced woman is without doubt
most inordinately vain of those. Of the two, so far as they are at present
developed, is there any doubt that the woman with beauty is better off
than the woman with brains? In some few hundred years, maybe, the brain of
woman will be a joy to herself and the world: when she has got more used
to its possession, and familiar with the fruitful control of it. At
present, however, it is merely a discomfort, not to say a danger, to
herself and every one else--a tiresome engine for the pedantic
assimilation of German and the higher mathematics. And it may well
happen--horrid prophecy--that when that brain of woman has come to its
perfection, the flower of its meditation will be to realise the
significance, the sacredness, of the Simple Woman. It is in its
apprehension of the mystery of simplicity that the brain of man, at
present, is superior to that of woman.

Young brain delights in the complex, old in the simple. Woman's love of
the complex has been illustrated abundantly during the last few years, in
her enthusiasm for certain great imperfect writers, who have been a