Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/232

 miles of heaven's blue piled on it. As every unconscious breath we draw compels the air to enter and circulate through us, so all our involuntary moods and actions invite the woman's perception. Who is not willing to exist immersed in this frank element that is without a motive?

But if some obscure caprice in a woman is always ready to steal out and nibble at her judgment, or if some obliquity faults her intrinsic nature, she can mistake you as rapidly as otherwise she might correctly hit. Nothing can be more unjust and cruel, more bitterly fostered, more viciously proclaimed, or virtuously insinuated, than the impromptu misinterpretations of a shallow or prejudiced woman. She may not be deep enough to be dangerous; but her prejudice saturates the mind, and there is no margin of a woman left. She plies her pea-blower in all companies: the little projectiles carry breath enough to tingle. They hit the people who ought to be your friends with a blow aimed by something that is unlike yourself, and which you are not capable of becoming. It is yourself soured in her spleen, poisoned by her spite. Some unsatisfied emotion degenerates into a damaged judgment.

If the instinct of womanhood be vitiated in a person of strong character, who insists upon being admired, and sweeps into her net all the adoration that is afloat, or if she is unsexed by any kind of mean ambition, her touch for man will be blunted. She will probably report his cutaneous defect, and overlook his spiritual substance. In treasuries and mints, the selection of women is made