emancipation of woman had gone on as it began when we were boys, we should by this time be importing wives for our sons from Timbuctoo or the Friendly Islands.  Happily, women are practical beings who rarely stray far from the narrow path along which usefulness and pleasure may still go hand in hand; for considering how much most women do that is useful, the amount of pleasure they get out of life is perfectly amazing; and when we try to keep up with them in the chase after amusement we are surprised at the number of useful things they accomplish without effort in twenty-four hours.

But, indeed, women are to us very like the moon, which has shown the earth only one side of herself since the beginning, though she has watched and studied our world from all its sides through uncounted ages.  We men are alternately delighted, humiliated, and terrified when women anticipate our wishes, perceive our weaknesses, and detect our shortcomings, whether we be frisky young colts in the field or sober stagers plodding along between the matrimonial shafts in harness and blinkers.  We pride ourselves on having the strength to smash the shafts, shake off the harness, and kick the cart to pieces if we choose, and there are men who can and do.  But the man does not live who knows what the dickens women are up to when he is going quietly along the road, as a good horse should.  Sometimes they are driving us, and then there is no mistake about it; and sometimes they are just sitting in the cart and dozing, and we can tell that they are behind us by their weight; but very often we are neither driven by them nor are we dragging them, and we really have not the faintest idea where they are, so that we are reduced to telling ourselves, with a little nervousness which we do not care to acknowledge, that it is noble and beautiful to trust what we love.

A part of the great feminine secret is the concealment of that independence about which there has been so much talk in our time.  As for suffrage, wherever there is such a thing, the woman who does not vote always controls far more men’s votes than the woman-who goes to the polls, and has only her own vote to give.

Margaret, the primadonna, did not want to vote for or against anything; but she was a little too ready to assert that she could and would lead her own life as she pleased, without danger to her good name, because she had never done anything to be ashamed of.  The natural consequence was that she was gradually losing something which is really much more worth having than commonplace, technical independence.  Her friend Lushington realised the change as soon as she landed, and it hurt him to see it, because it seemed to him a great pity that what he had thought an ideal, and therefore a natural manifestation of art, should be losing the fine outlines that had made it perfect to his devoted gaze.  But this was not all.  His rather over-strung moral sense was offended as well as his artistic taste.  He felt that Margaret was blunting the sensibilities of her feminine nature and wronging a part of herself, and that the delicate bloom of girlhood was opening to a blossom that was somewhat too evidently strong, a shade too vivid and more brilliant than beautiful.