Every one says that women are braver than men, and perhaps they are, but this is due to their lack of imagination. Suffering to them means simply suffering, whereas to men it means suffering plus the agonized preliminary picture of suffering. A dentist, in whose clutches a woman is notoriously brave, a man a shuddering coward, does not really hurt one a tenth as much as a man beforehand fancies he is going to hurt and at the moment fancies he is hurting. Too much awe is felt (by men) for what women go through at child-birth. Child-bearing is doubtless unpleasant for a woman, but it is infinitely worse for her husband, who sits in an atrocious hospital parlour and conjures up horrors. Women can have six children in six successive years and suffer detriment only to their figure; after the same experience their husbands are grey-haired tottering wrecks. But let us be thorough. Let us make no assertion about women that we do not investigate. I have mentioned and therefore must consider _Their Lack of Imagination._ This is akin to their inaptitude for abstractions, but, whereas they despise abstractions, they admire imagination and would like to possess it. But they do not possess it. A woman can readily take a fact and, with her gift of untruthfulness, develop it into another different fact or even into a firework-shower of facts; she cannot, as occasionally a man can do, place it and other facts together and build a cathedral. Women are far better observers than men, but they are never first-rate creative artists, hardly creative artists at all, either in cooking or in dressmaking, in painting or in literature, and (with the exception of Emily Brontë, who was a miracle) those who have come closest to being so were very mannish women. George Sand wore trousers, and Lewes’s unprintable physiological remark about George Eliot is well known. The excuse women give for this--that they have always been held back by men and have only recently begun to come into their own--is, and they know it to be, absurd. Women, at least in western countries, have always done whatever they wished with men. For two centuries they directed the political conduct and even the wars of the leading nation in Europe--and a pretty mess they made of it.