Certain of women’s little defects remain defects or become virtues according as the women know or do not know how to make use of them. Gossips, the women who can think and talk certainly are, and they plume themselves on the fact. That can only be called a defect in those who have nothing to say. Margaret of France confesses that when she opened her mouth, it was long before she shut it again.[255] Sometimes, however, women are troubled with a certain intellectual timidity arising either from their education, as their friends say, or from their temperament, as their enemies maintain. They easily make up their minds, but can seldom give you their reasons; their intellect clings like ivy to some principle reputed substantial, in other words, one that is affirmed by their neighbours, or is traditional, or is ingrained from childhood; and the slightest breath of raillery only attaches them to it the more closely. This disposition would be fatal to a writer. To write one needs the power to think for oneself and to give virile expression to one’s thoughts, at the risk of getting a name for paradox or eccentricity; but for conversation nothing is less necessary; on the contrary, the trite is eminently serviceable. Conversation serves to test current ideas; it gives them so to speak a stamp, a hall-mark, a label, and women understand its utility all the better because they largely avail themselves of it and acquire their convictions through it. On the other hand they possess as the gift of Nature that which is the very life of conversation,—facility of assimilation without the necessity of going to the root of the matter; the ability to express quickly, clearly and copiously the impression of the moment; a feeling for fine shades; skill in fitly garbing their thoughts, and in maintaining them with the necessary unction, grace, and warmth. No more is needed.