Vocabulary less Varied More Voluble _According to one of the chief living authorities on linguistics, Professor Jespersen, of Copenhagen, the speech of women can be differentiated in several ways from that of men. Women, he notes, are quicker to understand, quicker to utter what is in their minds. and quicker to answer than men; they confine themselves, as a rule, to the more ordinary words in the langu-ego, and avoid the recondite and the new; but at the same time they ave given to leaving their sentences unfinished, and they are habitually voluble, The causes of this difference between the speech or the talk of the two sexes lie far back in the occupational history of each; but great social changes are now in progress, which Professor Jespersen thinks may modify present con-trests. One such change, among educated circles at lea&t, is perhaps already observable. In the political field Helen is no longer, as she used to be, on the walls watching the combat. She has taken up arms herself, and a consequence of her action is that conversation, as it was formerly understood, seems to be in danger of becoming a lost art.
Over the dinner-table the discussion tends to be more and more of things, policies, wizardries, and less of human character and human motives. There was time when our fathers did not debate politics or the law with their womenfolk; nevertheless they listened attentively when their women folk chose to talk of the men and manners of the day. They understood that her detachment from the actual struggle gave woman a position to which man could not aspire. She spoke, in a sense, for
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.