There appears to be a great quantity of conceit around, especially concerning women.  The statement was recently set afloat that a well-known lady had admitted that George Meredith understands women better than any writer who has preceded him.  This may be true, and it may be a wily statement to again throw men off the track; at any rate it contains the old assumption of a mystery, practically insoluble, about the gentler sex.  Women generally encourage this notion, and men by their gingerly treatment of it seemed to accept it.  But is it well-founded, is there any more mystery about women—­than about men?  Is the feminine nature any more difficult to understand than the masculine nature?  Have women, conscious of inferior strength, woven this notion of mystery about themselves as a defense, or have men simply idealized them for fictitious purposes?  To recur to the case cited, is there any evidence that Mr. Meredith understands human nature—­as exhibited in women any better than human nature—­in men, or is more consistent in the production of one than of the other?  Historically it would be interesting to trace the rise of this notion of woman as an enigma.  The savage races do not appear to have it.  A woman to the North American Indian is a simple affair, dealt with without circumlocution.  In the Bible records there is not much mystery about her; there are many tributes to her noble qualities, and some pretty severe and uncomplimentary things are said about her, but there is little affectation of not understanding her.  She may be a prophetess, or a consoler, or a snare, but she is no more “deceitful and desperately wicked” than anybody else.  There is nothing mysterious about her first recorded performance.  Eve trusted the serpent, and Adam trusted Eve.  The mystery was in the serpent.  There is no evidence that the ancient Egyptian woman was more difficult to comprehend than the Egyptian man.  They were both doubtless wily as highly civilized people are apt to be; the “serpent of old Nile” was in them both.  Is it in fact till we come to mediaeval times, and the chivalric age, that women are set up as being more incomprehensible than men?  That is, less logical, more whimsical, more uncertain in their mental processes?  The play-writers and essayists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “worked” this notion continually.  They always took an investigating and speculating attitude towards women, that fostered the conceit of their separateness and veiled personality.  Every woman was supposed to be playing a part behind a mask.  Montaigne is always investigating woman as a mystery.  It is, for instance, a mystery he does not relish that, as he says, women commonly reserve the publication of their vehement affections for their husbands till they have lost them; then the woful countenance “looks not so much back as forward, and is intended rather to get a new husband than to lament the old.”  And he tells this story: