“I had supposed that there was but one answer to that old question: Because they have not been trained by getting on and off vehicles while the vehicles are in motion. A person who gets on a vehicle while it is in motion learns at once that the forward handle is the only safe handle to hold either in getting on or getting off. The forward handle is the one that preserves your balance should the vehicle start while you are getting on or off.” “Yes,” I said, “that is the old answer, too. But it does not answer enough. I have disproved its accuracy a score of times. I have seen women who knew better by precept, by example, and by experience get off backward, as if obeying some fatalistic impulse. The other day a woman who stepped off a car in my presence, firmly grasping the wrong handle, laughed and said, ‘There! that’s the wrong handle, but I can’t help it!’ That illustrates what I mean. She could not tell why she _had_ to take the wrong handle, which, if the car had been going in the other direction would have demanded the other hand. Your theory at best would only explain why women do not get off rightly. It does not explain why nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand get off wrongly. It would be well enough if the proportions were even, if the habit seemed like a matter of chance. But quite plainly it is not a matter of chance. There is a strange, and, as yet, unexplained impulse to which women yield when the moment of choice comes. Every day I see women get off the wrong way at real inconvenience. They are like Jerome K. Jerome’s stage villain who doesn’t want to be a villain, who is not profited by being a villain, but who, quite uncomplainingly, goes on being the villain in obedience to the unities. Once I thought I had grasped the thing, which you must know gave me a moment of superior comfort. A coach or a car, I said to myself, generally stops at a point beyond that at which the passenger really wishes to alight, as at the further curb, and in getting off and spurning the vehicle, as it were, the woman passenger, acting with primitive directness, turns her back upon it at the moment of alighting. But I have repeatedly seen women get off a trolley-car at a near corner when they had to turn about and walk in the direction the car was going, and they faced the rear of the car when they got off just as they do under all other circumstances. It is extraordinary. You must not think the inquiry trivial. It is not merely a question of a minor physical habit. There certainly is some momentous psychological significance under it all, something with a deep meaning if we only could get at it.” “Perhaps this backwardness has something to do with woman’s confusion as to right and left.”