Although conventional, she is often uninstructed in petty distinctions and laws which of late more and more growingly have manacled the hands, fettered the feet, and dwarfed the folk of our democracy; and which threaten that plasticity which, it is claimed, is the great characteristic of life. “It is quite possible,” says Clifford in his “Conditions of Mental Development,” “for conventional rules of action and conventional habits of thought to get such power that progress is impossible.... In the face of such danger _it is not right to be proper_.” Secretly our St. Louis neighbor, like most women, subjects herself to “the chill dread sneer Conventional, the abject fear Of form-transgressing freedom.” Openly she often passes it by and remarks, rocking her chair a trifle uneasily, that she is as good as anybody else. For some unspoken reason you never ask her if every one else is as good as she. You recall what de Tocqueville wrote eighty years ago: “If I were asked to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that [American] people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply--to the superiority of their women.” Of all so-called civilized women, she makes the greatest variation in her treatment of those of her own and those of the other sex. Toward women she is apt to be dull, splenetic, outspoken about what she esteems the faults of others. Even the weaknesses of her husband she analyzes to their friends--herein is a fertile source of divorce. Toward women, you observe, she is apt to be metallic, rattling, and uncharitable, or possibly over-social, relieving the peccant humors of her mind and attitudinizing upon what she esteems a man’s estimate of women--to please the sex she is not of. To men she is pert, flippant, witty, caustic, rapid, graceful, and gay. At times she amuses them and herself by slurring upon other women. She seems to leave it to the man to establish the spirit upon which the two shall meet; and by deft hand and turn and movement she is constantly suggesting her eternal variation from him. The woman is always chaste. It follows that marriages are many. A not uncommon fruit of marriage vows is an application for divorce, which she estimates with such levity and mental smack that you would hesitate to bring a young girl to her presence. “Has she applied, do you know?” “Oh! they’ve separated.” “On what grounds is she going to get it?” “If she isn’t careful she’ll lose her case by seeing him too often.” These are a few of many such sentences heard from her lips in public places.