Coyness, again, makes women deceitful and insincere. “Amongst her other feminine qualities,” says Thackeray of one of his characters, “she had that of being a perfect dissembler.” And in another place, “I think women have an instinct of dissimulation; they know by nature how to disguise their emotions far better than the most consummate courtiers can do.” It cannot be said that dissimulation is a virtue, though it may be a useful weapon against coarse and selfish men. If not the same thing as hypocrisy, it is next door to it; and it cannot have a beneficial effect on a woman’s general moral instincts if she is compelled constantly to act a part contrary to her convictions and feelings. Though as deeply in love as her suitor, she is commanded to treat him with indifference, coldness, even cruelty,—in a word, to do constant violence to her and his feelings, and to lacerate her own heart perhaps even more than the unhappy lover’s. Thus instead of mutually enjoying the period of Courtship, and indulging in harmless banter, “they gaze at each other fiercely, though ready to die for love”; or, as Heine puts it— “Sie sahen sich an so feindlich, Und wollten vor Liebe vergehen.” And why all this perverseness, this unnaturalness, this emotional torture? Simply because—once more be it said—the men of former days, the men who lived on pork and port, who delighted in bear-baiting, cock-fights, and similar æsthetic amusements, had nerves so coarse and callous that to make any impression on them the women had to play with them as a cat does with a mouse to make it tender and sweet. _Coyness lessens Woman’s Love._—One more charge, the gravest of all, remains to be piled on top, as a last crushing argument against crude Coyness. An emotion, like a plant, requires for its growth sunshine, light, and open air; if kept in a dark cellar and stifled, it soon becomes weak and pale and languishes. Man’s superior strength and selfish exercise of it have compelled women to cultivate Coyness as an art of dissembling, hiding, and repressing their real feelings. But to repress the manifestations of anger, of pity, of Love, is to suppress them; hence Coyness has necessarily had the effect of weakening woman’s Love. It weakens it in the same proportion as it strengthens man’s. And hence, as I have said before, the current notion that women love more ardently, more deeply, than men is an absurd myth. The poets have always shown a predilection for this, as for all other myths; and as it is still served up as a self-evident truth in a thousand books every year, it is worth while to clear away the underbrush and let in some daylight on the subject.