Few women know anything of the intricacies of a man's life and emotion, save such as are connected with love. Yet, though love is certainly the strongest passion in youth, it is by no means all powerful in maturity and middle age. But the lady's hero of fifty and upwards is as much under the influence of his erotic fancies as if he were a boy of eighteen; and life holds nothing worth living for if he does not get the woman with whom he has fallen in love. It seems impossible for a woman to understand the loftier side of a man's nature. She knows nothing, subjectively, of the political aims, the love for abstract truth, the desire for human progress, which take him out of the narrow domestic sphere, and make him comparatively indifferent to the life of sense and emotion altogether. And when she sees this she does not tolerate it. When Newton used his lady's little finger for a tobacco-stopper, he dug his grave in the female garden of the soul; and women rarely appreciate either Dr. Johnson or Dean Swift, because of the absence in the one of anything like romantic tenderness and its perversion in the other. All they care for is that men shall be tender and true to them; idealizing as lovers; as husbands constant and indulgent; and for this they will condone any amount of crookedness or meanness which does not make its way into the home. If he is complying and caressing there, he may be what fate and the foul fiend like to make him elsewhere, so long as he is not openly unfaithful and never gets drunk. All the false glitter of the Corsair school is due solely to the capacity for loving ascribed to the heroes thereof. Though a man's name be 'linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes,' the one virtue, being love, outweighs the thousand crimes in the estimation of women and of the more effeminate kind of poets; and so long as the 'heart is framed for softness,' it may be 'warped to wrong' without doing any Conrad much injury with them. The absolute rightness and justness of a man count for little in comparison with his tenderness; and we know of no woman whose ideal man would be one neither a saint nor a lover.