A man who talks much is nine times out of ten a clever and brilliant person, and may possibly be the most profound of thinkers, who brings out of the inexhaustible treasury of his imagination things new and old. A woman fool, on the contrary, usually does not find out, till she is old and ugly and the habit of silly chatter is irretrievably settled, that she is a fool at all: probably for the simple reason that the more folly she talks, the more delighted her male admirers generally show themselves with her discourse. Even if she does not happen to think herself particularly clever or well-informed, she has been taught to believe that ability in a woman is rather a defect to be concealed than a gift to be exhibited, and that, as the sagacious Chinese proverb has it, “The glory of a man is knowledge, but the glory of a woman is to renounce knowledge.” Accordingly, without the slightest reticence or dread of exposure, she tumbles out of her untidy brain notions as trivial and _mesquin_ as the contents of her own disorderly work-basket,--here a button and there a spangle, a thimble, a bit of crochet, a string of beads, a tangled skein of silk, and a little ribbon marked with inches wherewith to measure the universe. The result of this difference in the display of folly is naturally to lend color to a somewhat exaggerated estimate of that surplusage of feebleness and frivolity in the feminine scale, of the existence of which, alas! there can be no doubt, but which is perhaps less than is supposed out of proportion with the correlative dulness and stupidity in the masculine balance. As the immortal Mrs. Poyser sums up the matter, “Women _are_ fools. God Almighty made them so to match the men.”