But, exactly and scientifically speaking, neurotic and hysteric are contradictory terms. Neurotic men and women are described by physicians as self-forgetting sensitives--zealous, executive; while the hysterics of both sexes are supreme egotists, selfish, vain, and vague, uncomfortable both in personal and literary contact--just like wit at their expense. “If we knew all,” said George Eliot, who was never hysterical, “we would not judge.” And Paul of Tarsus wrote wisely to those of Rome, “Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art, that judgest.” Science nowadays declares that the man who wears a shirt-collar cannot be well, and equally the same analytic spirit may some day make evident that neurosis and hysteria are legacies of a foredone generation, who found the world out of joint and preyed upon its strength and calmness of nerve to set things right. Humaneness and fair estimate are remedies to-day’s dwellers upon the earth can offer, whether the neurosis and hysteria be Latin or Saxon, men’s or indeed women’s. The second of the phrases to which we adverted tells of “the unauthoritative young women who make dictionaries at so much a mile.” It has the smack of the wit of the eighteenth century--of Pope’s studied and never-ceasing gibes at Lady Mary Wortley Montagu after she had given him the mitten; of Dr. Johnson’s “female day” and his rumbling thunder over “the freaks and humors and spleen and vanity of women”--he of all men who indulge in freaks and humors and spleen and vanity!--whose devotion to his bepainted and bedizened old wife was the talk of their literary London. We are apt to believe the slurs that Pope, Johnson, and their self-applauding colaborers cast upon what they commonly termed “females” as deterrent to their fairness, favor, and fame. The high-noted laugh which sounded from Euphelia’s morning toilet and helped the self-gratulation of those old beaux not infrequently grates upon our twentieth century altruistic, neurotic sensibilities. But to return to our lamb. An unauthoritative young woman, we suppose, is one who is not authoritative, who has not authority. But what confers authority? Assumption of it? Very rarely anything else--even in the case of a college professor. We have in our blessed democracy no Academy, no Sanhedrim, no keeper of the seal of authority--and while we have not we keep life, strength, freedom in our veins. The young woman “who makes dictionaries at so much a mile” may be--sometimes is--as fitted for authority and the exercise of it as her brother. Academic as well as popular prejudices, both springing mainly from the masculine mind, make him a college professor, and her a nameless drudge exercising the qualities women have gained from centuries of women’s life--sympathetic service with belittling recognition of their work, self-sacrifice, and infinite care and patience for detail.