Hard, unblushing, unloving women whose ideal of happiness lies in swagger and notoriety; who hate home life and despise home virtues; who have no tender regard for men and no instinctive love for children; who despise the modesty of sex as they deny its natural fitness--these women have worse than no charm for men, and their place in the human family seems altogether a mistake. If there were any special work which they could do better than manly men or feminine women, we could understand their economic uses, and accept them as eminently unlovely outgrowths of a natural law, but at least as necessary and natural. But they are not wanted. They simply disgust men and mislead women; and those women whom they do not mislead in their own they often influence too strongly in the other direction by way of reaction, rendering them sickly in their sweetness, and weak rather than womanly. If the interlacing margins of certain things are lovely, as colours which blend together are more harmonious than those which are crudely distinct, it is not so with the interlacing margin of sex. Let men be men, and women women, sharply, unmistakably defined; but to have an ambiguous sex which is neither the one nor the other, possessing the coarser passions and instincts of men without their strength or better judgment, and the position and privileges of women without their tenderness, their sense of duty, or their modesty, is a state of things that we should like to see abolished by public opinion, which alone can touch it. _WOMEN'S MEN._ If songs are the expressions of a nation's political temper, novels show the current of its social morality, and what the learned would call its psychological condition. When French novelists devote half their stories to the analysis of those feelings which end in breaking the seventh commandment, and the other half to the gradual evolution of the evidence which leads to the detection of a secret murderer, we may safely assume, on the one hand, that the marriage law presses heavily, and, on the other, that the national intellect is of that ingenious kind which takes pleasure in puzzles, and is best represented by the familiar examples of dovetailing and mosaic work. When too, we see that their common feminine type is a creature given over as a prey to nervous fancies and an exalted imagination, of a feverish temperament and a general obscuration of plain morality in favour of a subtilizing and misleading kind of thing which she calls her _besoin d'âme_, we may be sure that this is the type most approved by both writer and readers, and that anything else would be unwelcome.