But the range of these feminine amenities is not confined to women; it includes men as well; and women continually take advantage of their position to insult the stronger sex by saying to them things which can be neither answered nor resented. A woman can with the quietest face and the gentlest voice imaginable insinuate that you have just cheated at cards; she can give you the lie direct as coolly as if she were correcting a misprint; and you cannot defend yourself. To brawl with her would be unpardonable; to contradict her is useless; and the sense of society does not allow you to show her any active displeasure. In this instance the weaker creature is the stronger, and the more defenceless is the safer. You have only the rather questionable consolation of knowing that you are not singular in your discomfiture, and that when she has made an end of you she will probably have a turn with your betters, and make them too, dance to her piping, whether they like the tune or not. At all events, if she humiliates you she humiliates her sisters still more; and with the knowledge that, hardly handled as you have been, others are yet more severely dealt with, you must learn to be content, and to practise as much of that grim kind of patience, which suffers keenly and bears silently, as your nature will permit. _GRIM FEMALES._ Almost all histories and mythologies embody the idea of a race of grim females. Whether as fabulous and complex monsters, like the Sphinx and the Harpies, or in the more human forms of the Fates and the Furies, unsexed women have been universally recognized as forming part of the system of nature and to be accepted among the stranger manifestations of human life. Yet it is hard to understand why they should exist at all. As moral 'sports,' they are so far interesting to the psychologists; but, as women with definite duties and fixed functions, nothing can be less admirable. They are even worse than effeminate men--which is saying everything. The grim female must be carefully distinguished from the masculine woman; for they are by no means essentially the same, though the types may run into each other, and sometimes do. But the masculine woman, if not grim but only Amazonian, has often much that is fine and beautiful in her, as we see in her great prototype Pallas Athene; but the grim female _pur sang_ is never noble, never beautiful; and the only meaning of her existence--the only mission she seems sent into the world to fulfil--is that of serving as a warning to the young what to avoid.