The atmosphere of Griffin-land, as Professor Theobald called it, while becoming to his character, made him a little recklessly frank at times.
He admitted that throughout his varied experience of life, he had found flattery the most powerful weapon in a skilled hand, and that he had never known it fail. He related instances of the signal success which had followed its application with the trowel. He reminded his listeners of Lord Beaconsfield’s famous saying, and chuckled over the unfortunate woman, “plain as a pike-staff,” who had become his benefactress, in consequence of a discreet allusion to the “power of beauty” and a well-placed sigh.
“The woman must have been a fool!” said Joseph Fleming.
“By no means; she was of brilliant intellect. But praises of that were tame to her; she knew her force, and was perhaps tired of the solitude it induced.” Professor Theobald laughed mightily at his own sarcasm. “But when the whisper of ‘beauty’ came stealing to her ear (which was by no means like a shell) it was surpassing sweet to her. I think there is no yearning more intense than that of a clever woman for the triumphs of mere beauty. She would give all her powers of intellect for the smallest tribute to personal and feminine charm. What is your verdict, Mrs. Temperley?”
Mrs. Temperley supposed that clever women had something of human nature in them, and valued overmuch what they did not possess.
Professor Theobald had perhaps looked for an answer that would have betrayed more of the speaker’s secret feelings.
“It is the fashion, I know,” he said, “to regard woman as an enigma. Now, without professing any unusual acuteness, I believe that this is a mistake. Woman is an enigma certainly, because she is human, but that ends it. Her conditions have tended to cultivate in her the power of dissimulation, and the histrionic quality, just as the peaceful ilex learns to put forth thorns if you expose it to the attacks of devouring cattle. It is this instinct to develop thorns in self-defence, and yet to live a little behind the prickly outposts, that leads to our notion of mystery in woman’s nature. Let a man’s subsistence and career be subject to the same powers and chances as the success of a woman’s life now hangs on, and see whether he too does not become a histrionic enigma.”
Professor Fortescue observed that the clergy, at times, developed qualities called feminine, because in some respects their conditions resembled those of women.
Theobald assented enthusiastically to this view. He had himself entered the church as a young fellow (let not Mrs. Temperley look so inconsiderately astonished), and had left it on account of being unable to conscientiously subscribe to its tenets.
“But not before I had acquired some severe training in that sort of strategy which is incumbent upon women, in the conduct of their lives. Whatever I might privately think or feel, my office required that I should only express that which would be more or less grateful to my hearers. (Is not this the woman’s case, in almost every position in life?) Even orthodoxy must trip it on tiptoe; there was always some prejudice, some susceptibility to consider. What was frankness in others was imprudence in me; other men’s minds might roam at large; mine was tethered, if not in its secret movements, at least in its utterance; and it is a curious and somewhat sinister law of Nature, that perpetual denial of utterance ends by killing the power or the feeling so held in durance.”