It is no use.  Woman, if she would, “cannot shake off the god.”  She must make up her mind, whatever other distinctions she may achieve, to her inalienable distinction of being woman; nothing she can do will change man’s eternal attitude toward her, as a being made to be worshipped and to be loved, a being of beauty and mystery, as strange and as lovely as the moon, the goddess and the mother of lunatics.  What a wonderful destiny is hers!  In addition to being the first of human beings, all that a man can be, to be so much else as well; to be, so to say, the president of a railroad and yet a priestess of nature’s mysteries; a stenographer at so many dollars a week and yet a nymph of the forest pools—­woman, “and yet a spirit still.”  Not without meaning has myth endowed woman with the power of metamorphosis, to change at will like the maidens in the legend into wild white swans, or like Syrinx, fleeing from the too ardent pursuit of Pan, into a flowering reed, or like Lamia, into a jewelled serpent—­

          Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d;
          And full of silver moons.

Modern conditions are still more favourable than antique story for the exhibition of this protean quality of woman, providing her with opportunities of still more startling contrasts of transformation.  Will it not be a wonderful sight in that near future to watch that woman judge of the Supreme Court, in the midst of some learned tangle of inter-state argument, turn aside for a moment, in response to a plaintive cry, and, unfastening her bodice, give the little clamourer the silver solace it demands!  What a hush will fall upon the assembled court!  To think of such a genius for jurisprudence, such a legal brain, working in harmony—­with such a bosom!  So august a pillar of the law, yet so divine a mother.

As it is, how piquant the contrast between woman inside and outside her office hours!  As you take her out to dinner, and watch her there seated before you, a perfumed radiance, a dewy dazzling vision, an evening star swathed in gauzy convolutions of silk and lace—­can it be the same creature who an hour or two ago sat primly with notebook and pencil at your desk side, and took down your specification for fireproofing that new steel-constructed building on Broadway?  You, except for your evening clothes, are not changed; but she—­well, your clients couldn’t possibly recognize her.  As with Browning’s lover, you are on the other side of the moon, “side unseen” of office boy or of subway throng; you are in the presence of those “silent silver lights and darks undreamed of” by the gross members of your board of directors.  By day—­but ah! at evening under the electric lights, to the delicate strains of the palm-shaded orchestra!  Man is incapable of these exquisite transformations.  By day a gruff and hurried machine—­at evening, at best, a rapt and laconic poker player.  A change with no suggestion of the miraculous.