apparently, beside this failure.  Evidently the Sphinx has not the face of a woman for nothing.  That is why no one has read her riddle, translated her mystic smile.  Yet many people smile mysteriously, without any profound meanings behind their smile, with no other reason than a desire to mystify.  Perhaps the Sphinx smiles to herself just for the fun of seeing us take her smile so seriously.  And surely women must so smile as they hear their psychology so gravely discussed.  Of course, the superstition is invaluable to them, and it is only natural that they should make the most of it.  Man is supposed to be a complete ignoramus in regard to all the specialised female ’departments’—­from the supreme mystery of the female heart to the humble domestic mysteries of a household.  Similarly, men are supposed to have no taste in women’s dress, yet for whom do women clothe themselves in the rainbow and the sea-foam, if not to please men?  And was not the high-priest of that delicious and fascinating mystery a man—­if it be proper to call the late M. Worth a man,—­as the best cooks are men, and the best waiters?

It would seem to be assumed from all this mystification that men are beings clear as daylight, both to themselves and to women.  Poor, simple, manageable souls, their wants are easily satisfied, their psychology—­which, it is implied, differs little from their physiology—­long since mapped out.

It may be so, but it is the opinion of some that men’s simplicity is no less a fiction than women’s mysterious complexity, and that human character is made up of much the same qualities in men and women, irrespective of a merely rudimentary sexual distinction, which has, of course, its proper importance, and which the present writer would be the last to wish away.  From that quaint distinction of sex springs, of course, all that makes life in the smallest degree worth living, from great religions to tiny flowers.  Love and beauty and poetry; Shakespeare’s plays, Burne-Jones’s pictures, and Wagner’s operas—­all such moving expressions of human life, as science has shown us, spring from the all-important fact that ‘male and female created He them.’

This everybody knows, and few are fools enough to deny.  Many people, however, confuse this organic distinction of sex with its time-worn conventional symbols; just as religion is commonly confused with its external rites and ceremonies.  The comparison naturally continues itself further; for, as in religion, so soon as some traditional garment of the faith has become outworn or otherwise unsuitable, and the proposal is made to dispense with or substitute it, an outcry immediately is raised that religion itself is in danger—­so with sex, no sooner does one or the other sex propose to discard its arbitrary conventional characteristics, or to supplement them by others borrowed from its fellow-sex, than an outcry immediately is raised that sex itself is in danger.

Sex—­the most potent force in the universe—­in danger because women wear knickerbockers instead of petticoats, or military men take to corsets and cosmetics!