“I do not believe that the æsthetic sense in the greatest artist is more developed than it is in hundreds of thousands of women who never touch art. His power of craftsmanship, purely material and mechanical, and his power of constructive imagination raise him to the heights, and these powers only come from the superior conditions favourable to them under which men have dwelt. “Go into any house, and you can tell if a woman lives there. Some delightful trace or touch betrays the fact. It may be a few flowers—it may be this or that, but the æsthetic touch is there; and in the home it is chiefly the woman who brings it. Now, why has woman developed this delightful attribute? It is a property of the mind; but men have it, too. Why has she developed it out of proportion to the man’s development in this particular? “Since she shares it with the man, it is a common attribute, and it is the purest common-sense to believe that she developed it simply because the conditions affecting her life were more favourable to its growth than the conditions affecting the life of the man. “Though the first scratchings of art in the cave-men’s dwellings were, most likely, the work of a man, who gave him the æsthetic basis of his artistic sense? Arguing from what we know—his mother. “And why did his mother cultivate this sense more than his father? “If you had seen his father tearing through forests after, and sometimes in front of, infuriated wild beasts, while his mother kept cave and looked after the children, you would have a complete and pictorial answer to that question. “Even the weariness of the chase is disastrous to the æsthetic sense. Look at all the hunting men and women you know, if you doubt what I say. “So, then, without any transcendental talk about ‘souls’ being organic or inorganic, we may say, arguing common-sensically, that women have developed one of the most distinguishing ‘womanly’ attributes, not because she is a woman, but because she is a human being, and the conditions under which she has always lived have tended toward that development. “Again—the love of a mother for her offspring, the one attribute of all attributes most distinctly and profoundly ‘womanly’: is it different in kind or essence from the love of a father for his offspring? Surely not, but it is more complex, more intimate, and more tender and more lovable, simply because the conditions under which it has grown have been more favourable to the development of this complexity, intimacy, and tenderness. “It is the same beautiful thing, but more peculiarly cultivated, and it has grown in complexity while the man has been hunting, or trading, or fighting the world in some other way.