The truth is that in few societies have women always had greater rights than in English society. The English woman is neither, like the Frenchwoman, the flying buttress of one particular man, nor, like the German, his beast of burden, nor like the American, his imperious tyrant: she is, as I have already pointed out, his companion, and she is the ideal companion because she has so long been admitted to all the private rights of companionship. English society is held together by English women, for the men of England have a strange aloofness from one another and a want of curiosity about one another which is always an astonishment to women, who can make or break men’s friendships without an effort. English men cling to one another with such feeble tendrils that the faintest tug pulls them apart. Yet, if women sometimes almost involuntarily apply the tug, they are coagulators of men, linking knots of them together by tighter bonds of familiarity than they could have ever manufactured for themselves. They are able to perform this function because the two sexes do not live separate lives converging at a few fixed points, but common lives with a few divergences which are becoming more and more reduced. Wherever you look you see them coupled together, in tea shops and restaurants, in theatres and music-halls and cinemas, on the hunting field and in the butt; they shop together, they serve together, they go to church together. This state of affairs is not without its disadvantages: it encourages, for one thing, a lower standard of common thought than in France where the men keep more to themselves and more together, setting a higher level of intelligence to which women are expected to conform when the two sexes meet on common ground. But it is the characteristic note of English society, in which alone could women say without pose or presumption that “they like to have their men about.” _Their_ men, mark you, not men in general, and in a very conscious possessive sense. There is an amusing passage in an early chapter of “Mount Music” by Miss Somerville and Martin Ross. Major Talbot-Lowry, a middle-aged country gentleman, has just left the room, singing. “In both his wife’s and his cousin’s faces was the same look that often comes into women’s faces when, unperceived, they regard the sovereign creature. Future generations may not know that look, but in the faces of these women, born in the earlier half of the nineteenth century, there was something of awe, and of indulgence, of apprehension and of pity. Dick was so powerful, so blundering, so childlike.” The authors are perhaps right in saying that future generations will not know this look: the awe and the apprehension are giving way to more sympathetic emotions. But the look that remains will not be unlike the old look. It is a look of which English men are more conscious than women suppose: they catch it early on the more innocent faces of sisters and sisters’ friends.