What they do give is amazing. It makes me feel almost as reverently toward them as Charles Dickens in his emotional moments. They are so very kind to men. They habitually smooth out all those difficulties, such as servant troubles, baby troubles, household difficulties, difficulties of the kitchen, which men fatuously call ‘the little problems of existence,’ not seeing that they are gigantic as compared with their own meagre business troubles. They are extraordinarily gentle with their husbands in illness or even in fancied illness, rarely showing any resentment at the impatience with which _they_ were treated when _they_ were ill. They put up with a turbulence, grossness and lack of all sense of what is seemly, that outrages their fastidiousness; they put up with men’s bragging, with men’s vanity, with their ridiculous assumption of gravity and importance (precisely like that of children dressed up in their parents’ clothes). In company they listen to their husbands relate the same, same, same jokes, and, instead of shrieking, smile, as though that were the first time they, too, had heard those jokes. They cajole and caress men out of infantile bad tempers, the logical cure for which would be a spanking. Themselves liking to eat little and delicately, they allow--nay, assist--men to eat much and grossly, and they watch the creatures’ mood change, in the process, from irascibility to mellow tenderness, and merely smile pleasantly, with scarcely perceptible irony. Have I really said that they are not artists? They are consummate artists to endeavour to work in such a hostile medium, to work with such material. But, no, they are not artists; for they do not do anything with the material, not really, not anything permanent. Still, that is not their fault, either. No one could, not even God. Ah, well, it is not possible that women endure all this, do all this (both so unnecessarily), out of altruism, sheer self-sacrifice. Earth is not heaven. They must have some obscure, if probably simple, reason. In the meantime men flourish and grow fat. LEGEND Under the influence of that gentle optimism which once upon a time suffused the world with a warm twilight glow, I used to believe that in the very long run truth would out, and that accordingly history was an exact science. Conceding cheerfully that a veracious history of our own period or of other periods close behind it was impossible, I yet took it for granted that, given time enough, falsehoods and misconceptions would be weeded out and documented objective truth established. This condition, I assumed, had already been perfectly achieved in the history of the various western nations up to about the period of the French Revolution, which still lay in a sort of gradually clearing penumbra.