The Good Englishwoman

Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.
The half title immediately before the title page has been omitted.
BY ORLO WILLIAMS, M.C. Author of “Vie de Boheme: A Patch of Romantic Paris,” “The Life and Letters of John Rickman,” etc.
LONDON GRANT RICHARDS LTD. ST MARTIN’S STREET MDCCCCXX
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE DUNEDIN PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH
TO BETTY WHEN SHE IS OLDER WITH THE SUPERFLUOUS INJUNCTION NOT TO TAKE THIS BOOK TOO SERIOUSLY
My uncle Joseph, a solitary man, once broke the silence of a country walk by asserting with explosive emphasis: “I don’t see how any man can understand women.” I assented vaguely, and he went on: “How can we ever grasp their point of view, my dear boy, which is so totally different from ours? How can we understand the outlook on life of beings whose instincts, training, purpose, ambitions have so little resemblance to ours? For my part I have given up trying: it is a waste of time. Never let a woman flatter you into thinking that you understand her: she is trying to make you her tool. The Egyptians gave the Sphinx a woman’s face and they were right. Women are so mysterious.” And the south-west wind took up his words and whispered them to the trees, which nodded their heads and waved their branches, rustling “mysterious, mysterious” in all their leaves.
I do not argue with my uncle Joseph, especially on a country walk when the south-west wind is blowing. So I took out my pipe and lit it in spite of the south-west wind, saying to myself: “You silly wind, you silly trees, you know nothing of wisdom. You would catch up anything that my uncle Joseph said and make it seem important.” And the south-west wind solemnly breathed “important” into the ear of a little quarry, in the tone of a ripe family butler. “There is just as much, and just as little, mystery about men and women as there is about you. It depends how much one wants to know. So far as there is any mystery, as a matter of fact, it is much more on the side of men, who are far more incalculable, far more complex than women in their motives and reactions. But men are lazy, you silly old things, and it saves a lot of trouble to invent a mystery and give it up rather than sit down before a problem to study it. Men have thousands of other things to think about besides women, but women, who have not the same variety, are so devilish insistent, that they would keep men thinking about them all their time if they could. So, in self-defence, men have pacified the dear things by calling them mysterious, which is highly flattering, and by giving them up for three-quarters of their days. Uncle Joseph has probably been arguing unsuccessfully with Aunt Georgiana, as he always will, because he never took the trouble to master her mental and emotional processes. But that does not prove the general truth of his proposition. His is just the mind which grows those weeds of everyday thought the seeds of which thoughtless south-west winds blow about as they do the seeds of thistles. Go off and blow those clouds away, you reverberator of commonplaces.”