They know that women regard them with a blend of tolerance and admiration, as a kind of familiar institution to which they are bound by ties too intimate to be unravelled or analysed. This intimate connection in the texture of society has an unmistakeable effect upon English men. It gives them, from early days, an inner refinement which, however rough and unpolished or cold and uncompromising their external appearance, is nearly always to be found behind it. Heavy-footed, wanting in delicacy and the finer shades as they may seem in comparison with men of some other nations, who pay more attention to finish and elegance of address, they are in many ways more truly civilised, with less of the wild man of the woods, the hunter, at the bottom of their natures. The manners of an English gentleman, which are manners of the heart, not of the dancing master or the enchanter, have, for their inward grace, no equal in the world. And the emotion which lies behind these manners is common to all English men, an emotion distilled of long and easy companionship with women, in which neither took more than was given in return, but the interchange of services and sympathies, not of mere compliments, naturally issued from mutual recognition of worth and mutual acknowledgement of dependence. For English women too this intimacy, which included a consciousness of the emotions it engendered in men, has had its peculiar grace. It has given them that frankness, that independence without bravado, that air of being equal to any situation, which are their remarkable qualities. At any age, even the most flighty, they fall too naturally into the performance of their stabilising function to waste more than a small and pardonable amount of energy upon private timidities and pursuits betraying a more primitive woman. They are in some sort aware of a national part to play which it would be indecent to abandon, either from passion or indifference. Hence they have a freer stride and a less self-conscious attitude than those women of other countries who are only credited with the graces and weaknesses of undiluted femininity.