A woman"s heart is an unfathomable ocean: nothing ever filled it; no one ever plumbed it. At the surface are glancing waves, or flying spume, or, it may be, raging billows; beneath are silent depths invisible to man. A thousand streams flow into it in vain. Towards varying coast-lines it bears itself variously; here, placid and content; there, dashing furious.
But none ever stamped his marked upon its brim, and always it remains the refluent, reluctant sea. Of it man knows only the waves that break or ripple at his feet. It betrays no 31 secrets; it asks not to be understood. Storm and calm but stir or still its surface, and what things it hides forever engulfed no one may learn. Subtle, yet mighty; an eternal, and entrancing, mystery to man.
A man"s heart is the enclosing sh.o.r.e; measurable, impressionable, definite, and overt; thinking to house that sea, shaping it, over looking it, and staying and governing its tides. Yet changed by it, crumbling before it, yielding to it: at once its guardian and its slave. Yet perhaps
The placidest of seas is that which is wholly land-locked.
Women, apparently, were made for men; men for themselves. Certainly
Men seem to carry out this design of Nature, that they should be ministered to by women.
A woman asks a woman questions in order to discover something. She asks a man questions in order to discover the man.
he last thing that a woman will risk is her personal appearance. Which is saying a good deal, for
A woman will risk an interview at an unseasonable hour, but not in an unseasonable frock.
Never, never take a woman au pied de la letter.
Women"s rights are: to be loved.
Women"s duties are: to love.
There is always something sovereign and monarchial about a woman: like a queen"s, her wishes are her commands. And
In matrimony, woman"s sovereignty is not abdicated. By no means; it is only transformed from an absolute into a const.i.tutional monarch : she acts then by and with the advice of her First Lord. This is the ideal State.
Woman"s true function, as a citizen, in this world is: to spur men on to high and n.o.ble action. And this, quite unconsciously, she does.
Woman"s true function, as a woman, in the world is: to evoke man"s most fervid emotions, and at the same time to keep them at their highest level. And this she also does--perhaps not quite so unconsciously.
They err who call women illogical. Feminine logic is inexorable. But it proceeds per saltum. It is man who has laboriously to reason step by step.
The most wayward woman craves control: To let a woman have her own way is interpreted by her as indifference. And
The surest way to fail to please a woman is to let her do what she pleases.
Woman is born to acting as the sparks fly upward. And
What a woman really is, n.o.body knows, least of all herself.
To see a woman as she really is, one must see her with her babe. For
It is curious, but it is true, that not even before the pa.s.sionate and accepted lover to whom she has utterly devoted herself can a woman bare her heart as can she to her babe. Perhaps we may go so far as to say that
Motherhood always partially eclipses wife-hood:
When the child comes, the man stands aside. For
It is not within the capability of man to evoke or to develop the totality of woman. There are feminine potentialities he is powerless to awake. There is a portion of womanliness always hidden from him. To her babe alone she opens the innermost recesses of her soul. For him she wears no masks, affect no accent, plays no part. Even her features take on a different and unique expression before the offspring of her womb.
Never is she more womanly, never so strong, never so quite, never so self-contained, never so completely herself, and never so beautify when bending over her helpless infant son. And naturally: for say what one will,
Motherhood is the goal of womanhood. And
Howsoever she comes by it, a woman"s burthen is always to her "That Holy Thing". So
No one knows what a woman is like till she is a mother. In other words
Motherhood reveals womanhood. And, be it remembered,
There be childless women--both spinsters and wives--who could mother mankind in their bosoms. Such women wield great influence. For
Many a mere man there is has owed his all to a motherly woman.
Nor speech, not restore, nor expression of feature, nor all combined, will ever reveal the real feelings of a woman. To unbosom herself is impossible to woman. Do not expect it, for
Definite and accurate utterance is not given to woman.
The chief business of woman is: first, to get married; second, to get others married.
It is difficult to say which have played the greater havoc among men: the women with too much conscience, or the woman with none.