That is what Edward Burden is doing for little Miss Averies. I don’t mean to say that he does not idealize her--but he sees her transfigured as the dispenser of his special brand of tea or the mother of the sort of child that he was. And that seems to me a very valid reason why women, if they were wise, should trust their fortunes cold-bloodedly and of set reason to the class of dangerous men that now allure them and that they flee from. They flee from them, I am convinced, because they fear for their worldly material fortunes. They fear, that is to say, that the poet is not a stable man of business: they recognise that he is a gambler--and it seems to them that it is folly to trust to a gambler for life-long protection. In that they are perhaps right. But I think that no woman doubts her power to retain a man’s affection--so that it is not to the reputation for matrimonial instability that the poet owes his disfavour. A woman lives, in short, to play with this particular fire, since to herself she says: “Here is a man who has broken the hearts of many women. I will essay the adventure of taming him.” And, if she considers the adventure a dangerous one, that renders the contest only the more alluring, since at heart every woman, like every poet, is a gambler. In that perhaps she is right. But it seems to me that women make a great mistake in the value of the stakes they are ready to pay in order to enter this game. They will stake, that is to say, their relatively great coin--their sentimental lives; but they hoard with closed fingers the threepenny bit which is merely the material future. They prefer, that is to say, to be rendered the mere presiding geniuses of well-loaded boards. It is better to be a lady--which you will remember philologically means a “loaf-cutter”--than to be an Ideal.