It is pitiful though, to see the stronger life thus dwarfed and bound. But women like it; and while the need for it lasts men must submit. The danger is lest the habit of the apron-string should become permanent; for it is so perilously pleasant to be petted and made much of by women, that few men can resist the temptation when it offers; and many have been ruined for the remainder of their days by an illness which gave them up into the keeping of wife and sisters--those fireside Armidas who will coddle all the real manliness out of their finest heroes, if they are let. If this kind of thing occurs at the break of life, the _mezzo cammino_ between maturity and age, it is doubly difficult to throw off; and many a man who had good years of vigour and strength, before him if he had been kept up to the mark, sinks all at once into senility because his womankind got frightened at that last small attack of his, and thought the best way to preserve him from another was to weaken him by over-care out of all wish for dangerous exposure. Perhaps the greatest misfortune that can befall a man is to have been an only son brought up by a timid widow mother. It is easy to see at a glance, among a crowd of boys, who has been educated under exclusively feminine influence. The long curled shining hair, the fantastic tunic--generally a kind of hybrid between a tunic and a frock--the lavish use of embroidery, the soft pretty-behaved manner, the clean unroughened hands, all mark the boy of whom his mother has so often wished that he had been a girl, and whom she has made as much like a girl as possible. His intellectual education has been as unboylike as his daily breeding. Mothers' boys are taught to play the piano, to amuse themselves with painting, or netting, or perhaps a little woolwork in the evenings--anything to keep them quietly seated by the family table, without an outbreak of boyish restlessness or inconvenient energy; but they are never taught to ride, to hunt, to shoot, to swim, to play at cricket, football, nor billiards, unless a stalwart uncle happens to be about who takes the reins in his own hand at times, and insists on having a word to say to his nephew's education.