But I am warned that I commit impropriety even in naming such matters.  They are ’sacred,’—­which means that we ought to be ashamed to mention them, however reverent our intention.  Motherhood, it would appear, is not, as one had regarded it, a sanctifying privilege, but a shameful disability, of which not the Immaculate Conception, but the ignoble service for the ‘purification’ of women, is the significant symbol.  It behoves not only the unmarried, but the married mothers, so to speak, to wear farthingales upon the subject, and pretend, with as grave a face as possible, that babies are really found under cabbages, or sent parcel post, on application, by her Majesty the Queen.

How long are we to retain the pernicious fallacy that sacredness is a quality inhering not in the sacred object itself, but in the superstitious ‘decencies’ that swaddle it, or that we best reverence such sacred object by a prurient prudish conspiracy of silence concerning it?

Then there is, it would also appear, a particular indignity, from the new virago’s point of view, in the assumption that a woman’s beauty is one of her great missions, or the supposition that she takes any such pride in it herself as man has from time immemorial supposed.  No sensible woman, we have been indignantly assured, ever plays at Narcissus with her mirror.  That all women find such pleasure in their reflections no one would think of saying.  How could they, poor things?  One is quite ready to admit that probably our virago looks in her glass as seldom as possible.  But all sensible women that are beautiful as well should take joy in their own charms, if they have any feelings of gratitude towards the supernal powers which might have made them—­well, more advanced than beautiful, and given them a head full of cheap philosophy instead of a transfiguring head of hair.

No one wants a woman to be silly and vain about her beauty.  But vanity and conceit are qualities that exist in people quite independently of their gifts and graces.  The ugly and stupid are perhaps more often conceited than the beautiful or the clever,—­vain, it would appear, of their very ugliness and stupidity.  Besides, is it any worse for a woman to be vain of her looks than of her brains?—­and the advanced woman is without doubt most inordinately vain of those.  Of the two, so far as they are at present developed, is there any doubt that the woman with beauty is better off than the woman with brains?  In some few hundred years, maybe, the brain of woman will be a joy to herself and the world:  when she has got more used to its possession, and familiar with the fruitful control of it.  At present, however, it is merely a discomfort, not to say a danger, to herself and every one else—­a tiresome engine for the pedantic assimilation of German and the higher mathematics.  And it may well happen—­horrid prophecy—­that when that brain of woman has come to its perfection, the flower of its meditation will be to realise the significance, the sacredness, of the Simple Woman.  It is in its apprehension of the mystery of simplicity that the brain of man, at present, is superior to that of woman.