Not such estimates alone, but this woman heard reference to herself in many phrases turning upon her chastity. Her very classification in the current vernacular was based upon her condition of sex. And at last she witnessed for her class an economic designation, the essence of vulgarity and the consummation of insolence--“superfluous women;” that is, “unnecessary from being in excess of what is needed,” women who had not taken husbands, or had lived apart from men. The phrase recalls the use of the word “female”--meaning, “for thy more sweet understanding,” a woman--which grew in use with the Squire Westerns of the eighteenth century, and persisted even in decent mouths until Charles Lamb wrapped it in the cloth of gold of his essay on Modern Gallantry, and buried it forever from polite usage. In another respect, also, this New England spinster grew into a being such as the world had not seen. It is difficult of explanation. Perhaps most easily said, it is this: she never by any motion or phrase suggested to a man her variation from him. All over the world women do this; unconsciously nearly always; in New England never. The expression of the woman has there been condemned as immodest, unwomanly, and with fierce invective; the expression of the man been lauded. Das Ewig-Weibliche must persist without confession of its existence. In the common conception, when among masculine comrades she should bear herself as a sexless sort of half-being, an hermaphroditic comrade, a weaker, unsexed creature, not markedly masculine, like her brother or the present golfing woman, and far from positively feminine. All her ideals were masculine; that is, all concrete and human expression of an ideal life set before her was masculine. Her religion was wholly masculine, and God was always “He.” Her art in its later phases was at its height in the “Spectator” and “Tatler,” where the smirking belles who matched the bewigged beaux of Anne’s London are jeered at, and conviction is carried the woman reader that all her sex expressions are if not foul, fool, and sometimes both fool and foul. In this non-recognition of a woman’s sex, its needs and expression in home and family life, and in the domination of masculine ideals, has been a loss of grace, facile touch in manner, vivacity, légèreté; in short, a want of clarity, delicacy, and feminine strength. To put the woman’s sex aside and suppress it was to emphasize spinster life--and increase it. It is this nullification of her sex traits that has led the world to say the New England woman is masculine, when the truth is she is most femininely feminine in everything but sex--where she is most femininely and self-effacingly _it_.