Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/243

 *minded woman who does the same, express themselves in different styles. The feminine style is shown in Constance with great discrimination. Both sexes can hate injustice, and may be opposed to compromises. Both can have indignation for a crime. But see how Constance puts into these moral feelings a scorn and a swiftness of dissent, urged by a volubility more native to a woman than to a man. Woman is apt, indeed, to be too voluble: each minute of her phrases breeds new ones; so she does not stop to notice that her indictment is shorter than her breath. Therefore men are apt to notice and to complain that her indictment does not reach up to the tide-mark of her breath. But the invective of Constance is the swift weapon-play of maternity: it flashes through every guard, touches rapidly to and fro, and draws blood at every unexpected touch.

A man's moral disposition has not been nourished and toned by the additional organs which impose wifehood and motherhood upon a woman. In her, more nerve centres are involved, with an exquisite sensibility for pain and pleasure which the average man's life seldom reaches. His bosom is not ample enough to contain such throbs of acquiescence or revolt. Every fount of feeling is twinned in woman, and sweet as the milk is, mingled by love, so sharp and bitter is its flavor made by hate. Her nerves revenge the violence of acts which she supposes dishonorable: she can fight with glances more searching and words more unequivocal than the cooler man will furnish. No doubt that his disdains, too, can summon all his blood to blush and lower magnificently