II

“What woman suffers from,” said the Philosopher, “is over-praise.  It has turned her head.”

“You admit, then, that she has a head?” demanded the Girton Girl.

“It has always been a theory of mine,” returned the Philosopher, “that by Nature she was intended to possess one.  It is her admirers who have always represented her as brainless.”

“Why is it that the brainy girl invariably has straight hair?” asked the Woman of the World.

“Because she doesn’t curl it,” explained the Girton Girl.  She spoke somewhat snappishly, it seemed to me.

“I never thought of that,” murmured the Woman of the World.

“It is to be noted in connection with the argument,” I ventured to remark, “that we hear but little concerning the wives of intellectual men.  When we do, as in the case of the Carlyles, it is to wish we did not.”

“When I was younger even than I am now,” said the Minor Poet, “I thought a good deal of marriage—very young men do.  My wife, I told myself, must be a woman of mind.  Yet, curiously, of all the women I have ever loved, no single one has been remarkable for intellect—present company, as usual, of course excepted.”

“Why is it,” sighed the Philosopher, “that in the most serious business of our life, marriage, serious considerations count for next to nothing?  A dimpled chin can, and often does, secure for a girl the best of husbands; while virtue and understanding combined cannot be relied upon to obtain her even one of the worst.”

“I think the explanation is,” replied the Minor Poet, “that as regards, let us say, the most natural business of our life, marriage, our natural instincts alone are brought into play.  Marriage—clothe the naked fact in what flowers of rhetoric we will—has to do with the purely animal part of our being.  The man is drawn towards it by his primeval desires; the woman by her inborn craving towards motherhood.”

The thin, white