This power which women have of inspiring fury in one another is very strange—is it confined to this country or is it universal? Englishwomen certainly have the power of goading one another to forget the first rudiments of good manners. They have a ruthless want of consideration for one another which to a man is quite appalling. A woman, usually suave as silk, will behave like a very shrew to a saleswoman or a shop-assistant, adopting in the first preliminaries of the bargain an attitude of suspicious disdain which, I confess, would prompt me to assault and battery. Men may be brutes, but they prefer to be gentle and accommodating in the smaller transactions of life. It is a pleasure to wait on them at meals or to serve them in shops. The man of fashion is urbane with his hosier, and the young clerk who haunts the neighbouring Lyons’ for lunch and dominoes has an easy-going politeness for the “Miss” who takes his order, to which she responds with the official affability of her class, comparable to the limp stiffness of an ill-starched shirt. But watch two Englishwomen at grips in a tea-shop, one serving, one waiting to be served. They measure one another with a chilly eye, each determined not to give an inch, for each knows there will be no pity on either side. They can be very hard, our Englishwomen, when no men are by, for, though they despise his softness and gullibility, they like to preserve the man’s illusion of equal softness in a woman. No man can be well served by women who do not love him: either they will take advantage of his good nature or show complete indifference to his exasperation. In either case he is powerless. He can neither inspire them to probity nor cow them into obedience as he can other men. But from women no women’s secrets are hid, and they do not scruple to use their penetration with a disregard of decency which is sometimes amazing.