Strength is needed as well for the taking as the making of an impression,—­something more than mere ductility.  Weakness may never bear the stamp of power,—­it breaks in the moulding; and it is rather because woman is so strong that she is able to take the Caesarean stamp of any form of power.  Nor cares she by whose hands she is moulded, whose image she wears, be it warrior, poet, or priest, so long as she feels the veritable grasp and impress of power.  Some women are already made in the image of the man they are to love before they meet him.  Very wonderful, very terrible, then, is the meeting, and it is a meeting that usually comes too late.  But oftener God gives a man a little measure of porcelain and a handful of stars, and leaves him to make the woman he needs for himself; and very wonderful too is that making,—­though the man will always have been the father before he was the lover.

Why, one may ponder, should a man who is great enough to mould a woman to help him be great, not be great enough to do without her at all?  Let lovers of the unfathomable ask at the same time:  Why is man, man? and woman, woman? and what are both?

This gentle doll with the sweet breath, which he nips up in his arms and kisses, and gives a tongue that she may talk back to him his own words, endows with brains that she may think his thoughts,—­a quaint little helpless lovely parody of his wisdom and power; a toy, yes; a refreshment, yes; a place of peace, yes,—­but how much more!  Yes, more by all that we don’t understand when we say “woman.”

Why a great man should need, not a great woman, but a little woman, a very little woman,—­how is it to be explained, unless it be that woman, however little, is mysteriously great, just because she is a woman, a little woman?  Unknown properties were wrapped up somewhere in that porcelain; to press it with the lips is to feel strange virtue coming into one,—­the devil was in those stars.

Great men are only nourished on the elements.  Woman is an element, all the elements in one,—­earth, air, fire, and water, met together in a rose.  She is a spring among the rocks, and she comes up dimpling from the roots of the world.  She is just as simple and just as strange.  O! little shining spring of woman that is called Jenny, a great man must draw up through you the unfathomed, deep strengths of the old world.  He bends above you and drinks, and as he drinks, his face is mirrored in yours.

“Jenny, I don’t think I’d read ‘Miss ——­,’ if I were you,” would say the great man.

“No, dear?” So Jenny was presently reading Ruskin instead, and wondering how she could ever have read “Miss ——.”  And deep in her dear heart she was saying, “Of course not; great men’s wives never read ‘Miss ——.’”

And yet had the great man said, “Read Gaboriau instead,”—­as a certain very great man does,—­Jenny’s heart would have said, “Of course, great men’s wives always read Gaboriau.”