Page:Varia.djvu/32

 20 the spirits of generous men," so that in marriage a man becomes slack and selfish, "and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being." Which is precisely the lesson thundered at us very unpleasantly by Mr. Rudyard Kipling in "The Gadsbys."

Now I wonder if the peasant and his donkey were in harder straits than the poor woman, who has stepped down the centuries under this disheartening, because inevitable condemnation. Always either too new or too old, too intelligent or too stupid, too restless after what concerns her not, or too passively content with narrow aims and outlooks, she is sure to be in the wrong whether she mounts her ass or leads him. Has the satire now directed against the higher education of women—a tiresome phrase reiterated for the most part without meaning—any flavor of novelty, save for those who know no satirists older than the contributors to "Punch" and "Life"? It is just as new as the new woman who provokes it, just as familiar in the annals of