But turn to the academic heroines of Mr. Besant. If they were not presented with the subtle suavity of his literary style, I do not know how we could endure the paragons of virtue and learning who occupy the foremost place in book after book that owns him author. Phillis, in _The Golden Butterfly_, came as a novelty, but the type perpetuated in each succeeding novel--now as Armorel Rosevean in _Armorel of Lyonesse_; again, as Angela Messenger in _All Sorts and Conditions of Men_, and so onwards--is both monotonous and earnest of a poverty of imagination. They would seem to be frankly unreal: an acknowledged Besantine convention--analogous to that early Christian art by which representations of saints, with attendant aureoles, and posing in impossible attitudes, were shown, not as portraitures, but as religious abstractions. These maidens are all sweet and severely proper; as learned as professors and as didactic as lecturers, and they have haloes heavy with gilding. ‘I cannot,’ cries the novelist, in effect, ‘show you the living woman. Consider: how unforeseen her contradictory attitudes and consistent inconsistency.’ And this, after all, is wisdom: to portray your ideal of the sweet girl graduate; to sketch woman as she might be, rather than to fashion an inadequate presentment of woman as she is. She will have to develop very greatly before she becomes the equal of man, either in mind or muscle; and she will have to slough some singular feminine characteristics if her incursions into masculine walks of life are to be continued. At present she carries her purse in her hand along the most crowded streets, at the imminent risk of its being snatched away. Ask her why she does this, and she will tell you that she has no pockets, or that they are difficult to reach, or else that they are too easily reached by pickpockets. It never occurs to her that the devising of new pockets comes within the range of the dressmaker’s craft. Not that it matters much; for the purse-snatcher obtains little result for his pains, and, beyond some postage-stamps, half a dozen visiting-cards, a packet of needles, and a few coppers, his enterprise usually goes unrewarded. Woman does not date her correspondence. She has no ‘views’ on the subject; she simply forgets. Sometimes, indeed, she will head her letters with the day of the week; but, as the weeks slip by, a letter written on any ‘Wednesday’ becomes rather vague in date. Also, it is notorious that the gist of a woman’s letter, the real reason of its being written, appears in a postscript.