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4 felt and thought. But the living may wait till they, too, are dust; or, while their brief day lasts, they may read all the books in all the tongues of earth, con every record in clay or stone or papyrus, and still know only half the story. Schliemann may uncover one Troy after another, six separate cities deep, and never come the nearer to what Helen thought. All that is not silence is the voice of man.

Some would wrest the significance of this to a reproach against woman, seeing in it the most sweeping of all the indictments against her belated claim to stand—in civilised communities—on an equal footing with her brother man. But to read history so is to understand man's part in it as little as woman's.

If I were one of the "dominant sex," J think I would not be so sure, as many good men seem to be, that they are competent to speak for women. If I were a man, and cared to know the world I live in, I almost think it would make me a shade uneasy—the weight of that long silence of one-half the world; even more uneasy, if, being a man, I should come to realise the strange persistence of the woman in her immemorial role. When I should hear women chattering, I almost think I might not feel it so acute in me to note that with all their words they so seldom "say anything." What if they know better? What if it is by that means they have kept their secret? For let no one think the old rule of feminine dissimulation is even yet superseded.

Some measure we get of the profundity of that