proud of it. The inherent tendency of any woman above the most
stupid is to evade the whole obligation, and, if she cannot actually
evade it, to reduce its demands to the minimum. And
when some accident purges her, either temporarily or
permanently, of the inclination to marriage (of which much more
anon), and she enters into competition with men in the general
business of the world, the sort of career that she commonly carves
out offers additional evidence of her mental peculiarity. In whatever
calls for no more than an invariable technic and a feeble chicanery
she usually fails; in whatever calls for independent thought and
resourcefulness she usually succeeds. Thus she is almost always a
failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow
phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts
these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost
always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a
compound of trivialities and rogueries that her sense of intellectual
integrity revolts against it. But she is usually a success as a
sick-nurse, for that profession requires ingenuity, quick
comprehension, courage in the face of novel and disconcerting
situations, and above all, a capacity for penetrating and dominating
character; and whenever she comes into competition with men
in the arts, particularly on those secondary planes where simple
nimbleness of mind is unaided by the masterstrokes of genius, she
holds her own invariably. The best and most intellectual--i.e., most
original and enterprising play-actors are not men, but women, and
so are the best teachers and blackmailers, and a fair share of the best
writers, and public functionaries, and executants of music. In the
demimonde one will find enough acumen and daring, and enough
resilience in the face of special difficulties, to put the equipment of
any exclusively male profession to shame. If the work of the