To be sure, we women are sadly kept down in this world, whatever we shall be in the next. If they would only let us try, I think we could beat the "lords of the creation," as they call themselves, at everything they undertake. Dear me, they talk about our weakness and vanity--why, they never know their own minds for two minutes together; and as for vanity, only tell a man you think him good-looking, and he falls in love with you directly; or if that is too great _a bounce_--and indeed very few of them have the slightest pretensions to beauty--you need only hint that he rides gallantly, or waltzes nicely, or wears neat boots, and it will do quite as well. I recollect perfectly that Cousin Emily made her great marriage--five thousand a year and the chance of a baronetcy--by telling her partner in a quadrille, quite innocently, that "she should know his figure anywhere." The man had a hump, and one leg shorter than the other; but he thought Emily was dying for him, and proposed within a fortnight. Emily is an artless creature--"good, common-sense," Aunt Deborah calls it--and so she threw over Harry Bloomfield and married the hump and the legs that didn't match and the chance of the baronetcy forthwith; and now they say he beats her, and I think it serves her right. But we women--gracious! if we only take the trouble we can turn the whole male sex round our little fingers. Who ever saw half a dozen of us hovering and watching and fussing round a masculine biped, thankful even to be _snubbed_ rather than not noticed at all. Who ever saw us fetch and carry like so many retrievers, and "sit up," so to speak, for a withered rose-bud at the fag end of an over-blown bouquet. Not that we don't love flowers in their proper places, and _keep_ them too, sometimes long after their colour has faded and their perfume gone; but we don't make a parade of such things, and have the grace to be ashamed of ourselves when we are so foolish.