be her.  Nothing to worry her all day long.  No responsibility.’  For in his primitive vision of female existence, his wife languidly presides for ever at an eternal five-o’clock tea.  And it is not in the province of this article to turn to him the seamy side of that charming picture.  Rather is it our mission to convince him of the substantial truth of his intuition.  He is quite right.  It is ‘nice to be her.’  And if men had a little more common-sense in their consequential skulls, instead of striving to resist the woman’s invasion of their immemorial responsibilities and worries, they would joyfully abdicate them—­and skip home to Nirvana and afternoon tea.

Foolish women!  To want of your own free will to put yourselves in painful harness; to take the bit of servitude between your rose-leaf lips; to fight day-long in the reeking arena of bacon merchants; to settle accounts instead of merely incurring them; to be confined in Stygian city-blocks instead of silken bedchambers; to rise with the sparrow and leave by the early morning train.  What fatuity!  Some day, when woman has had her way and man has ceased to have his will, she will see of the travail of her soul and be bitterly dissatisfied; for, unless man is a greater fool than he looks, she shall demand back her petticoats in vain.

For what is the lot of woman?  The first superficial fact about a woman is, of course, her beauty.  Secondly, as the leaves about a rose, comes her dress.  To be beautiful and to wear pretty things—­these are two of the obvious privileges of woman.  To be a living rose, with bosom of gold and petals of lace, a rose each passer-by longs to pluck from its husband-stem, but dare not for fear of the husband-thorns.  To be privileged to play Narcissus all day long with your mirror, to love yourself so much that you kiss the cold reflection, yet fear not to drown.  To reveal yourself to yourself in a thousand lovely poses, and bird-like poises of the head.  To kneel to yourself in adoration, to laugh and nod and beckon to yourself with your own smiles and dimples, to yearn in hopeless passion for your own loveliness.  To finger silken garments, linings to the casket of your beauty, never seen of men, to draw on stiff embroidered gowns, to deck your hands with glittering jewels, and your wrists with bands of gold—­and then to sail forth from your boudoir like the moon from a cloud, regally confident of public worship; to be at once poet and poem, painter and painted:  does not this belong to the lot of woman?

But it was of nobler privileges than these that the candidate for womanhood of whom I have spoken was thinking.  It is fit that we skim the surface before we dive into the deeps—­especially so attractive a surface as woman’s.  He was, doubtless, thinking less of woman as a home comfort or a beauty, and much more of her as she once used to be among our far-off sires, Sibyl and Priestess.  Is it but an insular fancy to suppose that Englishmen,