in the
commercial arena has her little nook, made dainty by feminine touches,
to which she gladly creeps at night. Would it not be sweeter if it were
shared by one who would always love her? As truly as she needs her bread
and meat, woman needs love, and, did he but know it, man needs it too,
though in lesser degree.

[Sidenote: The Verity and the Vision]

Lacking the daily expression of it which is the sweet unction of her
hungry soul, she seeks solace in an ideal world of her own making. It is
because the verity jars upon her vision that she takes a melancholy view
of life.

One of woman's keenest pleasures is sorrow. Her tears are not all pain.
She goes to the theatre, not to laugh, but to weep. The clever
playwright who closes his last scene with a bitter parting is sure of a
large clientage, composed almost wholly of women. Sad books are written
by men, with an eye to women readers, and women dearly love to wear the
willow in print.

Women are unconscious queens of tragedy. Each one, in thought, plays to
a sympathetic but invisible audience. She lifts her daily living to a
plane of art, finding in fiction, music, pictures, and the stage
continual reminders of her own experience.

Does her husband, distraught with business cares, leave her hurriedly
and without the customary morning kiss? Woman, on her way to market,
rapidly reviews similar instances in fiction, in which this first
forgetting proved to be "the little rift within the lute."

The pictures of distracted ladies, wild as to hair and vision, are sold
in photogravure by countless thousands--to women. An attraction on the
boards which is rumoured to be "so sad," leads woman to economise in
the matter of roasts and desserts that she may go and enjoy an
afternoon of misery. Girls suffer all their lives long from being taken
to mirthful plays, or to vaudeville, which is unmixed delight to a man
and intolerably cheerful to a woman.

[Sidenote: Woman and Death]

Woman and Death are close friends in art. Opera is her greatest joy,
because a great many people are slaughtered in the course of a single
performance, and somebody usually goes raving mad for love. When Melba
sings the mad scene from _Lucia_, and that beautiful voice descends by
lingering half-notes from madness and nameless longing to love and
prayer, the women in the house sob in sheer delight and clutch the hands
of their companions in an ecstasy of pain.

In proportion as women enjoy so