The relationship between what she is thinking and what she will say is one of the most complex in nature, and I fancy that in our climate and environment its fundamental complexity has been increased. I know that it is the habit of science to assume that the reason woman seems more contradictory than man is not that she is dishonest, but that she is impulsive. Impulse naturally is far less uniform than reason. “They change their opinions,” complains Heine, “as often as they change their dress,” a sentiment which proves conclusively that Heine had credulous intervals. A woman who always had the same opinion would instinctively realize the stupidity of that condition, as she would the condition of always being seen in the same dress; and if she didn’t have a new opinion she might do with the old opinion as with the old dress, turn or cut it over. You cannot say from the notorious inaccuracy of a woman’s gesture when she presumes to place her hand on her heart, that she has not a heart, that she is unaware of its precise location, or that it is not in the right place. If a man means less than he says, and a woman always means more, we may see at a glance that it is easier to subtract than to add. But this is not the chief difficulty. A man, if I may be pardoned the dogmatism, always speaks in the original, while woman must be translated, and it is vastly easier in any case, to translate his hyperbole than her meiosis. When woman was simpler, she had less of this quality. When she said no, and simply meant yes, man learned to translate and understand her. Even a man could work out by the least subtle of reasoning that when she said “No!” most fiercely she really was saying, “_Idiot!_ why don’t you _make_ me say yes!” But after a time, perhaps because she suspected, for good reason, man’s discovery of the cypher, because she saw that it was not enough to turn the alphabet upside down, woman began to qualify rather than to invert, and man was no longer in possession of the key. The whole arithmetic of the calculation was infinitely lifted, and rose from the rule of three into the higher realms of pure mathematics. If she _always_ called him back he would know just what to do. If a little absence _always_ made her heart grow fonder, the process was capable of exact and circumstantial procedure. But no longer is it so. She may, indeed, still mean yes when she says no. She reserves her constitutional rights. But to read her language now, to filch from her swift talk the true meaning, to trace in the deceptively deep stream of her feminine philosophy the faintly shining pebbles of pure fact, is a function calling out the highest that is in man. [Illustration]