MEN’S LOVE
Jan. 20, 19—.
My dear Alexa,—
Your appetite for knowledge does you credit. It is inherited, doubtless. And how comprehensive it is! You wish you knew all about men, do you? A moderate wish; a wish that if realised would make you empress of the world. Yes, that and nothing less than that is the destiny of the woman, when she arrives, who knows all about men. We shall not see her just yet though, and when, if ever we do, then, as Swinburne’s distressful lover says:
“Content you, I shall not be there.”
So as things are I sleep peacefully o’ nights. That masterful lady does not even trouble my dreams.
Don’t you know, child, that men are now, and always have been, combined in a conspiracy not to let women know all about them; nay, more than that, to permit women to know as little as possible? Men are not very clever in other ways, but they are, I fancy, clever enough to make that particular conspiracy a success. They have done very well so far, anyhow.
Women know curiously little about men; curiously little considering the long time they have had to study the subject, and how greatly it has always been to their interest to know as much as possible. Take women novelists, for instance—not the silly sort, but the very best of them, the giantesses of fiction—Georges Sand, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë—to say nothing of the second string, the women writers of our day, the Mrs Craigies, the Ouidas, the Mrs Humphrey Wardses. Why is it, by the way, that when there was no “Woman Movement” there were great women artists, and that now when woman is clamorous and obtrusive there are none?