of the age-long blunders of the masculine mind in the contemplation of feminine ways.  Men have constantly committed the double error of overlooking the dissimulation of women and of over-estimating it.  This fact has always served to render more difficult still the inevitably difficult course of women through the devious path of sexual behavior.  Pepys, who represents so vividly and so frankly the vices and virtues of the ordinary masculine mind, tells how one day when he called to see Mrs. Martin her sister Doll went out for a bottle of wine and came back indignant because a Dutchman had pulled her into a stable and tumbled and tossed her.  Pepys having been himself often permitted to take liberties with her, it seemed to him that her indignation with the Dutchman was “the best instance of woman’s falseness in the world."[307] He assumes without question that a woman who has accorded the privilege of familiarity to a man she knows and, one hopes, respects, would be prepared to accept complacently the brutal attentions of the first drunken stranger she meets in the street.

It was the assumption of woman’s falseness which led the ultra-masculine Pepys into a sufficiently absurd error.  At this point, indeed, we encounter what has seemed to some a serious obstacle to the full moral responsibility of women.  Dissimulation, Lombroso and Ferrero argue, is in woman “almost physiological,” and they give various grounds for this conclusion.[308] The theologians, on their side, have reached a similar conclusion.  “A confessor must not immediately believe a woman’s words,” says Father Gury, “for women are habitually inclined to lie."[309] This tendency, which seems to be commonly believed to affect women as a sex, however free from it a vast number of individual women are, may be said, and with truth, to be largely the result of the subjection of women and therefore likely to disappear as that subjection disappears.  In so far, however, as it is “almost physiological,” and based on radical feminine characters, such as modesty, affectability, and sympathy, which have an organic basis in the feminine constitution and can therefore never altogether be changed, feminine dissimulation seems scarcely likely to disappear.  The utmost that can be expected is that it should be held in check by the developed sense of moral responsibility, and, being reduced to its simply natural proportions, become recognizably intelligible.

It is unnecessary to remark that there can be no question here as to any inherent moral superiority of one sex over the other.  The answer to that question was well stated many years ago by one of the most subtle moralists of love.  “Taken altogether,” concluded Senancour (De l’Amour, vol. ii, p. 85), “we have no reason to assert the moral superiority of either sex.  Both sexes, with their errors and their good intentions, very equally fulfil the ends of nature.  We may well believe that in either of the two divisions of the human species