Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/322

 than he deserves. This is not the case with woman,—not, at least, in the regions where there are too many mouths and too scanty subsistence; nor in those where cultivated women cherish an interest in equality of opportunities; nor in those where the public law discriminates against them; nor in those where woman dislikes the liberty to be taxed without the right to vote upon the taxing. It is all the more incumbent upon women to be jealously careful that their self-respect, at least, should be adequately represented. They defeat their own thought when they applaud the thin speech which sometimes lends its want of voice to it. It is a "childish treble" that "pipes and whistles in its sound." There is no reason, because its piping and whistling were never tolerated before, that the new chance should confer immunity upon it. The liberty of later times must not be, for either sex, an unchartered libertine. Truth, eternal nature, the laws of mind and the moods of feeling, combine to take a mortgage upon it, whose interest must be paid in coin that is accepted as legal tender by the gifts that hold it. Recognizing this, perhaps the time will come when a superior womanhood shall remand masculine incapacity swiftly to the oblivion it deserves, whenever it mars blocks of marble, squanders paint, debauches music, or drones an absurd bass about God, Religion, and the awful morals. Pray Heaven to have woman restrained from the dilettantism of modern times!

When Portia's heart unties the spasm of joy that tightened round it at Bassanio's choice, it beats again with the grave and sweet dignity that is as native to her