TO BETTY
WHEN SHE IS OLDER
WITH THE SUPERFLUOUS INJUNCTION
NOT TO TAKE THIS BOOK
TOO SERIOUSLY
CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| [I]. | The Man in the Sidecar | 9 |
| [II]. | Little Girls | 29 |
| [III]. | Big Girls | 51 |
| [IV]. | The English Wife | 76 |
| [V]. | The English Mother | 102 |
| [VI]. | The Englishwoman’s Mind | 128 |
| [VII]. | The Englishwoman’s Manners | 145 |
| [VIII]. | The Englishwoman and the Arts | 166 |
| [IX]. | The Englishwoman in Society | 187 |
| [X]. | The Englishwoman at Work | 204 |
| [XI]. | The Englishwoman at Play | 219 |
| [XII]. | The Englishwoman in Parliament | 234 |
[CHAPTER I]
A FEW REMARKS FROM THE MAN IN THE SIDECAR
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.”
Throwing up his hands with a shriek of “commonplaces,” the wind flew up over the hill ruffling its hair as he passed.
I think I was quite right not to answer my uncle Joseph and to rebuke the south-west wind. People are so tiresomely fond of uttering generalisations which they do not really believe and on which they never act. It is surely no less foolish to say that women are complete mysteries than to say that one understands them perfectly. Every individual understands a few men and a few women, or life would be impossible. Besides, understanding has its degrees which approach, but never reach, perfection. Samuel Butler somewhere says that the process of love could only be logically concluded by eating the loved one—a coarse way of saying that perfect love would end in complete assimilation: it is the same with the relation of knowledge. Happily love between human beings of opposite sexes can exist without being pushed to this voracious conclusion: so can understanding.