to our thoughts.  Diderot returns in the evening from Holbach’s, throws his carpet-bag in at the door, flies off to seek a letter from Mademoiselle Voland, writes one to her, gets back to his house at midnight, finds his daughter ill, puts cheerful and cordial questions to his wife, she replies with a tartness that drives him back into silence.[197] Another time the scene is violent.  A torrent of injustice and unreasonableness flows over him for two long hours, and he wonders what the woman will profit, after she has made him burst a blood-vessel; he groans in anguish, “Ah, how hard life seems to me to bear!  How many a time would I accept the end of it with joy!"[198] So sharp are the goads in a divided house; so sorely, with ache and smart and deep-welling tears, do men and women rend into shreds the fine web of one another’s lives.  But the pity of it, O the pity of it!

There are many brighter intervals which make one willing to suppose that if the wife had been a little more patient, more tolerant, more cheerful, less severely addicted to her sterile superstition, there might have been somewhat more happiness in the house.  One misery of the present social ideal of women is that, while it keeps them so systematically ignorant, superstitious, and narrow, it leaves them without humility.  “Be content,” said the great John Wesley to his froward wife, “be content to be a private insignificant person, known and loved by God and me.  Of what importance is your character to mankind?  If you was buried just now, or if you had never lived, what loss would it be to the cause of God?” This energetic remonstrance can hardly be said to exhaust the matter.  Still it puts a wholesome side of the case which Madame Diderot missed, and which better persons are likely to miss, so long as the exclusion of women, by common opinion or by law, from an active participation in the settlement of great issues, makes them indifferent to all interests outside domestic egoism, and egoistic and personal religion.  Brighter intervals shone in the household.  “I announced my departure,” writes Diderot, “for next Tuesday.  At the first word I saw the faces both of mother and daughter fall.  The child had a compliment for my fete-day all ready, and it would not do to let her waste the trouble of having learnt it.  The mother had projected a grand dinner for Sunday.  Well, we arranged everything perfectly.  I made my journey, and came back to be harangued and feasted.  The poor child made her little speech in the most bewitching way.  In the middle there came some hard words, so she stopped and said to me, ’My papa, ’tis because my two front teeth have come out’—­as was true.  Then she went on.  At the end, as she had a posy to give me, and it could not be found, she stopped a second time to say to me—­’Here’s the worst of the tale; my pinks have got lost.’  Then she started off in search of her flowers.  We dined in great style.  My wife had got all her friends together.  I was very gay, eating, drinking, and doing the honours of my table to perfection.  On rising from table I stayed among them and played cards instead of going out.  I saw them all off between eleven and twelve:  I was charming, and if you only knew with whom; what physiognomies, what folk, what talk!”