A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The mark of that so so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, an habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the norma] family circle, is a hero, a magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mounted The proverb that no man is a hero to his valet is obviously of masculine manufacture. It is both insincere and untrue because it merely masks the egotistic doctrine that he is potentially a° hero to every one else, and untrue because a valet, being a fourth-rate man himself, is likely to be -the last person in the world to penetrate his master's charlantanry. Who ever heard of a valet who didn't envy his) master wholeheartedly? who would n't ingly change Wi places with his master? who didn't secretly wish that he was his mas ter?
A man's wife labours under no such naive folly. She may envy her husband, true enough, certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities. She may envy him his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his impenetreble complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak of romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she never envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy and preposterous soul.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.