Herbert.  Nonsense.  There isn’t a wife in the world who has not taken the exact measure of her husband, weighed him and settled him in her own mind, and knows him as well as if she had ordered him after designs and specifications of her own.  That knowledge, however, she ordinarily keeps to herself, and she enters into a league with her husband, which he was never admitted to the secret of, to impose upon the world.  In nine out of ten cases he more than half believes that he is what his wife tells him he is.  At any rate, she manages him as easily as the keeper does the elephant, with only a bamboo wand and a sharp spike in the end.  Usually she flatters him, but she has the means of pricking clear through his hide on occasion.  It is the great secret of her power to have him think that she thoroughly believes in him.

The young lady staying with Us.  And you call this hypocrisy?  I have heard authors, who thought themselves sly observers of women, call it so.

Herbert.  Nothing of the sort.  It is the basis on which society rests, the conventional agreement.  If society is about to be overturned, it is on this point.  Women are beginning to tell men what they really think of them; and to insist that the same relations of downright sincerity and independence that exist between men shall exist between women and men.  Absolute truth between souls, without regard to sex, has always been the ideal life of the poets.

The mistress.  Yes; but there was never a poet yet who would bear to have his wife say exactly what she thought of his poetry, any more than he would keep his temper if his wife beat him at chess; and there is nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.

Herbert.  Well, women know how to win by losing.  I think that the reason why most women do not want to take the ballot and stand out in the open for a free trial of power, is that they are reluctant to change the certain domination of centuries, with weapons they are perfectly competent to handle, for an experiment.  I think we should be better off if women were more transparent, and men were not so systematically puffed up by the subtle flattery which is used to control them.

Mandeville.  Deliver me from transparency.  When a woman takes that guise, and begins to convince me that I can see through her like a ray of light, I must run or be lost.  Transparent women are the truly dangerous.  There was one on ship-board [Mandeville likes to say that; he has just returned from a little tour in Europe, and he quite often begins his remarks with “on the ship going over;” the Young Lady declares that he has a sort of roll in his chair, when he says it, that makes her sea-sick] who was the most innocent, artless, guileless, natural bunch of lace and feathers you ever saw; she was all candor and helplessness and dependence; she sang like