Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/215

 WOMEN AND MEN.

Man draws near to woman with the fly-net of his analysis, thinking to steal up and capture the secrets of her disposition. He finds a distance drawn across his way which he never entirely passes. It is the distance of sex. The greatest intimacy of marriage itself, which blends two beings into one fate, and compels them to set up housekeeping on the principle of mutualism, is still evaded by motives and moods which the woman holds in reserve, not by calculation, but through the instinct of a difference which the husband cannot entirely penetrate. It is not that man reaches results chiefly by the processes of judgment, and woman chiefly by a method which is not thinking so much as it is a taste or touch of the objects she observes. But she is removed from his scrutiny because the complexity of sex constructs her soul, becomes the essence of her motives, decides her virtues and her vices, and modifies the intellect itself. She contains all qualities, but not in the masculine proportion. Sex also irrevocably decides for the average man, as for the average woman, the plus and minus of each attribute. Woman's mode of life must so defer to the tendency of her sex, that a variety of objects are prevented from pressing into her experience. She is less actively in motion from place to place than man, who mingles with many crowds and learns to