I think I was quite right not to answer my uncle Joseph and to rebuke the south-west wind. People are so tiresomely fond of uttering generalisations which they do not really believe and on which they never act. It is surely no less foolish to say that women are complete mysteries than to say that one understands them perfectly. Every individual understands a few men and a few women, or life would be impossible. Besides, understanding has its degrees which approach, but never reach, perfection. Samuel Butler somewhere says that the process of love could only be logically concluded by eating the loved one—a coarse way of saying that perfect love would end in complete assimilation: it is the same with the relation of knowledge. Happily love between human beings of opposite sexes can exist without being pushed to this voracious conclusion: so can understanding. It may be true that women have quicker intuitions than men, though only over a limited range of subjects: but men, on the other hand, are more widely and studiously observant, besides being far more interested in the attainment of truth as the result of observation. Patient induction is, after all, an excellent substitute for brilliant guessing. Women would be extremely disappointed if men really acted on the “mystery” theory and took to thinking or writing as little about woman as the majority think or write about the problem of existence. Nothing, however, will prevent men from talking and thinking about women, and a glance at any bookshelf will prove that they do not always do so in complete ignorance of their subject. Balzac, who was no magician, was not entirely beside the mark in creating the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and Lady Teazle is a recognizable being. George Meredith’s Diana seems to have human substance: Mr Shaw’s Anne in “Man and Superman” and Mr Wells’ Anne Veronica, though founded on masculine observations, are admitted by women to be reasonable creations. The laziness of men, I repeat, and the vanity of women are responsible for the legend of woman’s inviolable mystery. The laws of gravitation were a mystery till Newton used his observation: the mystery still remains, but the experiments of Newton and other physicists has driven it further back. So it is with the human soul. Each one is a mystery, but observation and familiarity can penetrate a number of its veils, leaving only some of the intimate recesses unexplored, and even these recesses are threatened with exposure as our knowledge of telepathy and of the subconscious elements increases.