results.  In all these cases clearness of presentation, weight of invective, keenness of analysis spring from interest.  None of these women, if she has a feminine mind, treats these things as a man would.  We men are very apt to complain of the woman’s mental processes, for the same reason that narrow “patriots” always suspect and deride the methods of a foreigner, simply because they are strange and we do not understand them.  But what we are compelled to think of the results is shown by the fact that when we are truly wise we are apt to seek the advice and counsel of the other sex and to act upon it, even when we cannot fathom the processes by which it was reached.

All the more reason this why the woman should be left to herself and not forced to model her club paper on the mental processes of a man, used with many necessary elisions and sometimes with very bad workmanship, in the construction of the cyclopaedia article never intended to be employed for any such purpose.

Perhaps we can never make the ordinary clubwoman talk like Susan B. Anthony, or Anna Shaw, or Beatrice Hale, or Fola La Follette; any more than we can put into the mouth of the ordinary business man the words of Lincoln, or John B. Gough, or Phillips Brooks, or Raymond Robins—­but get somehow into the weakest of either sex the impulses, the interests, the energies that once stood or now stand behind the utterances of any one of these great Americans, and see if the result is not something worth while!  An appreciative critic of the first paper in this series, writing in The Yale Alumni Weekly, gives it as his opinion that these readers are in the first stage of their education—­that of “initial intellectual interest.”  He says:  “Curiosity, then suspicion, come later to grow into individual intellectual judgment.”

I wish I could agree that what we have diagnosed as a malady is only an early stage of something that is ultimately to develop into matured judgment.  But the facts seem clearly to show that, far from possessing “initial intellectual interest,” these readers are practically devoid of any kind of interest whatever, properly speaking.  Such as they have is not proper to the subject, but simply due to the fact that they desire to retain their club membership, to fulfil their club duties, and to act in general as other women do in other clubs.  To go back to our recent simile, it is precisely the same interest that keeps you listening, or pretending to listen, to a bore, while you are really thinking of something else.  If you were free to follow your impulses, you would insult the bore, or throw him downstairs, or retreat precipitately.  You are inhibited by your sense of propriety and your recognition of what is due to a fellow-man, no matter how boresome he may be.  The clubwoman doubtless has a strong impulse to throw the encyclopaedia out of the window, or to insult the librarian (occasionally she does) or even to resign from the club.  She is prevented, in like manner, by her sense of propriety, and often, too, we must admit, by a real, though rudimentary, desire for knowledge.  But such inhibitions cannot develop into judgment.  They are merely negative, while the interest that has a valuable outcome is positive.