Man may talk as much as he pleases; the spoken word exerts no potent influence over a genuine woman. So long as her emotions are strongly affected, the whole line of argumentation to which the word gives expression seems to her but a piece of academical man-invented pedantry--the learned twaddle of the schools. She inclineth not her ear to _reasons_; she considers them an intolerable imposition, an encroachment upon the realm of her sentiment and the supremacy of her feminine intuition. Her logic is passion; she feels but her mood, her interest; she sees things and relations but as they regard her personally. Whether there is an injustice to others implied, and what is the true import of things _per se_, all that is rarely comprehended and retained by a woman where her interest or her antipathy comes into play. In the entire course of the clearest and concisest exposition the fair listener is occupied only with her excitement and opposition, and never with the subject in question and its importance. The spoken word, as soon as she is required to acknowledge its office as bearer and representative of spirit, to value its absolute potency, is to her but empty sound. At the last she yields to pathos--to emphasis, to oratory, as she might do in a play. The dialectics affect her possibly by their eloquence, diction, and plastic qualities, rarely by the force of conviction. When all his arguments are exhausted, and the speaker looks forward to the effect for the sake of which he has marshalled all his rhetorical art and logic, and taken his eloquence into both hands as it were, Madam comes back to the same fatal point, to the same nonsense from whence she started; and all the forces of rhetoric, all the concentrated reasoning goes for nothing. Now the man’s temper rises, and he waxes indignant; a piece of copper is finally persuaded by the hammer to become a tea-kettle; words can be engraved on stone and steel, why not upon the _tabula rasa_, the blank daguerreotype-plate of a woman’s mind?