Sex operates as a stimulant. And to be always under influence of a stimulant is enervating. On the other hand, when, from over-indulgence, Sex or any other stimulant ceases to release new inspiration and forces, it is sign of a permanently enervated state. Or sex operates as a hypnotic. And to be always under hypnotic influence is as destructive of individuality as it is fatal to achievement.
The sexes require to separate, accordingly, in order to derive fresh impulse on coming together again.
Both work more seriously and sincerely, more efficiently and more effectively, apart; taking counsel, when need be, one of the other.
The dilettante spirit and amenities of mixed companies, destructive of "thoroughness," are greatly to blame for that decline of British commerce which has followed on the Feminist invasion of business-houses.
Significant of the trend is the fact that young and pretty and inefficient girls are selected for business positions, as clerks and so forth, while older women of experience and accredited ability are rejected summarily. It is, doubtless, amusing and flattering to masculine employers to be surrounded by attractive youth of the opposite sex. But it is conducive neither to commercial enterprise nor to achievement.
IV
Because of the intrinsic variability underlying her duality of constitution, the happy mean and balance (difficult to all humans) are especially difficult to woman.
Man, like herself, is of dual constitution. But he is more firmly, because less finely, poised between his two orders of Traits. She, on the contrary, tends to oscillate between the opposite extremes of her two-sided nature. A bent which may be traced, throughout history, in the excesses, in one or the other direction, that have characterised the careers of many famous women-personages.
The Ultra-Feminine extreme, which results from lack of due balance of her woman-side by the masculine side of her, and the Mannish extreme, occasioned by over-development of her masculine inherences, may be regarded as, respectively, the Scylla and Charybdis—the rocks of the Male-traits, or the vortex of the Female-traits—whereon, equally, may be wrecked the noblest characteristics and the highest values of the sex, when it fails to steer clear, in medias res, of either.