VIRAGOES OF THE BRAIN

The strength of the old-fashioned virago was in her muscles.  That of the newfangled modern development is in her ’reason’—­a very different thing indeed from ‘woman’s reasons.’  As the former knocked you down with her fist, the latter fells you with her brain.  In her has definitely commenced that evolutionary process which, according to the enchanting dream of a recent scientist, is to make the ‘homo’ a creature whose legs are of no account, poor shrivelled vestiges of once noble calves and thighs; and whose entire significance will be a noseless, hairless head, in shape and size like an idiot’s, which the scientist, gloating over the ugly duckling of his distorted imagination, describes as a ’beautiful, glittering, hairless dome!’ A sad period one fears for Gaiety burlesque.  In that day a beautifully shaped leg and a fine head of hair will be rather a disgrace than a distinction.  They will be survivals of a barbarous age.  Indeed that they are already so regarded, there can be no doubt, by the more ‘advanced’ representatives of the female sex.

There is one radical difference between the old and the new virago:  the old gloried in the fact that she was a woman, because thus her sex triumphed over that male whom she despised, like her modern sister, in proportion as she resembled him.  The new virago, however, hates above all things to be reminded of her womanhood, which she is constantly engaged in repressing with Chinese ferocity.  Not, as we have hinted, that she thinks any better of man.  Though she dresses as like him as possible, she is very angry if you suggest that she at all envies him his birthright.  And the humour of the situation, the hopeless dilemma in which she thus places herself—­if it be right to apply the feminine gender!—­never occurs to one whose sense of humour has long been atrophied, perhaps at Girton, or by a course of sterilising Extension lectures.

Obviously, there is but one course open for the advanced ‘woman’ in this dilemma—­to evolve a third sex, and this she is doing her best to achieve, with, I am bound to admit, remarkably speedy success.  The result up to date is the Virago of the Brain, or the Female Frankenstein.  The patentees of this fearsome tertium quid hope to present it to their patrons, within a very few years, in a form entirely devoid of certain physiological defects, with which the cussedness of human structure still uselessly burdens the Virago.  As it is, of course, it is by no means uncommon for the virago to be born without that sentimental organ, the heart; and it can, therefore, only be a matter of time before she is rid of what the present writer has been criticised for calling ’her miraculous womb.’  Doubtless, the patentees will then turn their attention to Sir Thomas Browne’s suggested method for the propagation of the race after the reasonable, civilised, and advanced manner of trees.