Who was the wit who, to the usual misquotation from Buffon, _le style c’est l’homme_, rejoined _mais ce n’est pas la femme_? The statement has perhaps as much truth as is required from a witticism; it is half true. Woman, unlike man, does not express all of herself. She has her reticences, her euphemisms, and her asterisks. She will on no account name all things by their names. It is one of the childish weaknesses of men, she holds, to practise veracity to excess. Like children, they cannot help blurting out the truth. But she, from diligent experiments on her own person, has learnt that truth looks all the better for having its nose powdered and its cheeks discreetly rouged. Readers of George Sand’s “Histoire de ma Vie” are often baffled in tracing the fine distinction between the woman and the make-up. Therein the work is typical, illustrating as it does the general desire of women in literature to look pretty—to look pretty in their mirror, for themselves, for their own pleasure. Not, as is sometimes erroneously asserted, to look pretty in the eyes of men or of a particular man. So one is amused but scarcely convinced by Heine’s well-known remark that every woman who writes has one eye on her paper and the other on some man—except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who had only one eye. Evidently the generalization was invented just to spite the countess. Mme. de Sévigné’s letters to her daughter are far better than those to Bussy-Rabutin. George Eliot may have had one eye on Lewes when she did her best to spoil her novels by scientific pedantry—which was sheer waste (let alone the damage to the novels), as Lewes was, by all accounts, the ugliest man in London. But on what man had Jane Austen an eye? One might ask the question about our thousands of women novelists to-day, and at once see the refutation of Heine in simple arithmetic; there would not be enough men to go round. There is clearly no rule. Heine may have been thinking of George Sand, already mentioned, whose eye—her “glad eye,” I fear it must be called—revolved as she wrote upon a round dozen of men in turn.