Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/207



"He wished for her to have come to him out of an egg shell, somewhat more astonished at things than a chicken, but as completely enclosed before he tapped the shell, and seeing him with her sex's eyes first of all men."

In another of the late novels, the two abstractions, society and woman, are fused in one description as,—

"* * * the terrible aggregate social woman, of man's creation, hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and nevertheless, upheld, esteemed, applauded: a mark of civilization, on to which our human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner. She exhibits virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast, and blood of victims on it."

This is discrimination; the general dearth of which is lamented by Lady Dunstane:

"The English notion of women seems to be that we are born white sheep or black; circumstances have nothing to do with our colour. They dread to grant distinctions, and to judge of us discerningly is beyond them."

And Lætitia, after listening to a long Patterne discourse on feminine traits and limitations, laconically sums up the whole matter in a compact epigram:

"'The generic woman appears to have an extraordinary faculty for swallowing the individual.'"

After this, decidedly flat and puerile falls the witticism of Kingsley, spoken by Bracebridge in reply to Lancelot's