"I'm not sure I should mind it!" laughed Picard—"with the Bosphorus at one's door, of course."
"The Bosphorus wouldn't help you," said Sir Henry. "She'd come up again if she wanted, you may depend, though you sank her forty fathom deep, with a round-shot tied to her ankles. No; I think I understand the sex thoroughly. In my own experience, I've found them perverse, wilful, obstinate."
"Unselfish, at least," put in Picard.
"Unselfish!" exclaimed the other. "Not a bit of it! They're twice as selfish as we are, and that's saying a good deal. A tyrant, indeed, keeps them down, and so long as he remains perfectly unfeeling, the thing works moderately well. But if they can get what you and I call a good fellow to marry them, why he leads the life of a galley slave! There was my poor brother Ralph—I do believe, sir, he died of it—married a pig-headed idiot without two ideas, and she traded on his kind heart till she wore it clean away. I argued the point with her once. Fancy arguing with a woman, and an ignorant one! 'What should you say,' I asked, 'if Ralph took you out partridge-shooting, we'll suppose, and kept you for hours standing in wet turnips to load for him, or carry a spare gun? Yet you have no scruple in making him accompany you to parties, which he hates far more than you would the wet turnips, and are not ashamed to speak very unkindly to him even if he looks bored.' 'That's nothing to do with it,' she answered.—Such is a woman's logic.—'I dare say you wouldn't stand it; but then you've more character than Ralph!' She's married a stock-jobber since. I'm happy to say he bullies her like the devil, yet I do believe she likes him twice as well as Ralph."
"But you took warning, I hope, Sir Henry," said Picard, laughing in his sleeve.
"They never tried that sort of thing with me," answered the baronet. "Still, there's no certainty about the thing, and I fancy it's better to let it alone. Besides, one's ideas vary about women in a regular procession of decades. Up to ten, we're dependent on them; from ten to twenty, we despise them; from twenty to thirty, we adore them; from thirty to forty, we believe in them; from forty to fifty, we mistrust them; from fifty to sixty, we avoid them; from sixty to seventy, we tolerate them; and if we live any longer after that, why we become dependent on them again."
Picard burst out laughing.
"A moral lesson!" he exclaimed, "and from one who has not neglected practice in theory. Here we are at your own door, Sir Henry. I shall not forget your maxims. Good night."
The other feeling for his latch-key, looked up where the blinds were drawn over the windows of Helen's bed-chamber.
"There are exceptions," said he musingly, "and one good one is worth all the others put together; and yet nine-tenths of our annoyances, and all our sorrows, can generally be traced to a woman."