Who can blame her?  If there is one thing more provoking than another to a woman, it is to see her husband Strass-engel, Haus-teufel, an angel of courtesy to every woman but herself; to see him in society all smiles and good stories, the most amiable and self-restraining of men; perhaps to be complimented on his agreeableness:  and to know all the while that he is penning up all the accumulated ill-temper of the day, to let it out on her when they get home; perhaps in the very carriage as soon as it leaves the door.  Hypocrites that you are, some of you gentlemen!  Why cannot the act against cruelty to women, corporal punishment included, be brought to bear on such as you?  And yet, after all, you are not most to blame in the matter:  Eve herself tempts you, as at the beginning; for who does not know that the man is a thousand times vainer than the woman?  He does but follow the analogy of all nature.  Look at the Red Indian, in that blissful state of nature from which (so philosophers inform those who choose to believe them) we all sprang.  Which is the boaster, the strutter, the bedizener of his sinful carcase with feathers and beads, fox-tails and bears’ claws,—­the brave, or his poor little squaw?  An Australian settler’s wife bestows on some poor slaving gin a cast-off French bonnet; before she has gone a hundred yards, her husband snatches it off, puts it on his own mop, quiets her for its loss with a tap of the waddie, and struts on in glory.  Why not?  Has he not the analogy of all nature on his side?  Have not the male birds and the male moths, the fine feathers, while the females go soberly about in drab and brown?  Does the lioness, or the lion, rejoice in the grandeur of a mane; the hind, or the stag, in antlered pride?  How know we but that, in some more perfect and natural state of society, the women will dress like so many quakeresses; while the frippery shops will become the haunts of men alone, and “browches, pearls and owches be consecrate to the nobler sex?” There are signs already, in the dress of our young gentlemen, of such a return to the law of nature from the present absurd state of things, in which the human peahens carry about the gaudy trains which are the peacocks’ right.

For there is a secret feeling in woman’s heart that she is in her wrong place; that it is she who ought to worship the man, and not the man her; and when she becomes properly conscious of her destiny, has not he a right to be conscious of his?  If the grey hens will stand round in the mire clucking humble admiration, who can blame the old blackcock for dancing and drumming on the top of a moss hag, with outspread wings and flirting tail, glorious and self-glorifying.  He is a splendid fellow; and he was made splendid for some purpose surely?  Why did Nature give him his steel-blue coat, and his crimson crest, but for the very same purpose that she gave Mr. A——­ his intellect—­to be admired by the other sex?  And if young damsels, overflowing with sentiment and Ruskinism, will crowd