Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/159

Rh "subjection" first and foremost. That condition, which, according to Scripture, only followed after the curse as its direct product, was, you will remember, predicated by Milton, quite falsely, as essential even to the paradisal state; and when in Paradise Lost he laid down this law of "subjection" as the right condition for unfallen womanhood, he went on to describe the divinely appointed lines on which it was to operate. The woman was to subject herself to man—

"with submission,           And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay."

Those, surely, are the qualifications of the courtesan for making herself desired; and it is no wonder, if he had such an Eve by his side as was invented for him by Milton, that Adam fell.

Where true womanliness is to end I do not know; but I am pretty sure of this—that it must begin in self-possession. It is not womanly for a woman to deny herself either in comforts or nourishment, or in her instincts of continence and chastity in order that someone else—whether it be her children or her husband—may over-indulge. It is womanly (it is also manly), when there is danger of hurt or starvation to those for whom you are responsible, to suffer much rather than that they should suffer; but it is not in the least womanly or manly to suffer so that they may indulge. The woman who submits to the