Of all the many affectations of women, this affectation of their own harmlessness when beautiful, and of their innocence of design when they practise their arts for the discomfiture of men, is the most dangerous and the most disastrous. But what can one say to them? The very fact that they are dangerous disarms a man's anger and blinds his perception until too late. That men love though they suffer is the woman's triumph, guilt and condonation; and so long as the trick succeeds it will be practised.
Another affectation of the same family is the extreme friendliness and familiarity which some women adopt in their manners towards men. Young girls affect an almost maternal tone to boys of their own age, or a year or so older; and they, too, when their wiser elders remonstrate, declare they mean nothing, and how hard it is that they may not be natural! This form of affectation, once begun, continues through life; being too convenient to be lightly discarded; and youthful matrons not long out of their teens assume a tone and ways that would befit middle age counselling giddy youth, and that might by chance be dangerous even then if the 'Indian summer' were specially bright and warm.
Then there is that affectation pure and simple which is the mere affectation of manner, such as is shown in the drawling voice, the mincing gait, the extreme gracefulness of attitude which by consciousness ceases to be grace, and the thousand little minauderies and coquetries of the sex known to us all. And there is the affectation which people of a higher social sphere show when they condescend to those of low estate, and talk and look as if they are not quite certain of their company, and scarcely know if they are Christian or heathen, savage or civilized. And there is the affectation of the maternal passion with women who are never by any chance seen with their children, but who speak of them as if they were never out of their sight; the affectation of wifely adoration with women who are to be met about the world with every man of their acquaintance rather than with their lawful husbands; the affectation of asceticism in women who lead a self-enjoying life from end to end; and the affectation of political fervour in those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to save Europe from universal revolution.
Go where we will, the affectation of being something she is not meets us in woman, like a ghost we cannot lay, a mist we cannot sweep away. In the holiest and the most trivial things we find it penetrating everywhere—even in church and at her prayers, when the pretty penitent, rising from her lengthy orisons, lifts her eyes and furtively looks about to see who has noticed her self-abasement and to whom her picturesque piety has commended itself. All sorts and patterns of good girls and pleasant women are very dear and delightful; but the pearl of great price is the thoroughly natural and unaffected woman—that is, the woman who is truthful to her heart's core, and who would as little condescend to act a pretence as she would dare to tell a lie.
INTERFERENCE.
About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. We do not mean tyranny; that is another matter—tyranny being active while interference is negative—the one standing as the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of the same principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some personal gain in view when it takes it in hand to force people to do what they dislike to do; while interference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply prevents the exercise of free-will for the mere pleasure to be had out of such prevention.
Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than domestic; but the curse of interference is seen most distinctly within the four walls of home, where also it is most felt. Very many people spend their lives in interfering with others—perpetually putting spokes into wheels with the turning of which they have nothing to do, and thrusting their fingers into pies about the baking of which they are in no way concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women make up the larger number and are the greater sinners. To be sure there are some men—small, fussy, finnicking fellows, with whom nature has made the irreparable blunder of sex—who are as troublesome in their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the feminine characteristics of men are so exceptional that we need not take them into serious calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in any manly sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a right to control—say, with the wife's low dresses or the daughter's too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and, knowing what other men say of such displays, or fearing their effect, they stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But this kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes into another class of motives altogether and does not belong to that kind of interference of which we are speaking.
Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other and with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to church and subscribing to their favourite mission, so much as they tell us what we are not to do. They do not command so much as they forbid. And, of all women, wives and daughters are the most given to handling these check-strings and putting on these drag-chains. Sisters, while young, are obliged to be less interfering, under pain of a perpetual round of bickering; for brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of creatures for the most part so loftily snubbed as sisters; while mothers nine times out of ten are laid aside for all but sentimental purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be a boy and has learned to become a man. The queenhood, therefore, of personal and domestic interference lies with wives, and they know how to use the prerogative they assume. Take an unlucky man who smokes under protest—his wife not liking to forbid the pleasure entirely, but always grudging it and interfering with its exercise. Each cigar represents a battle, deepening in intensity according to the number. The first may have been had with only a light skirmish—perhaps a mere threatening of an attack that passed away without coming to actual onslaught; the second brings up the artillery; while the third or fourth lets all the forces loose, and sets the big guns thundering. She could understand a man smoking one cigar in the day, she says, with a gracious condescension to masculine weakness; but when it comes to more she feels that she is called on to interfere, and to do her best towards checking such a reprehensible excess. It does not weaken her position that she knows nothing of what she is talking about. She never smoked a cigar herself, therefore does not understand the uses nor the abuses of tobacco; but she holds herself pledged to interfere so soon as she gets the chance; and she redeems that pledge with energy.
The man too, who has the stomach of an ostrich and an appetite to correspond, but about whom the home superstition is that he has a feeble digestion and must take care of his diet, has also to run the gauntlet of his wife's interfering forces. He never dines nor sups jollily with his friends without being plucked at and reminded that salmon always disagrees with him; that champagne is sure to give him a headache to-morrow; and, 'My dear! when you know how bad salad is for you!' or, 'How can you eat that horrid pastry? You will be so ill in the night!' 'What! more wine? another glass of whisky? how foolish you are! how wrong!' The wife has a nervous organization which cannot bear stimulants; the husband is a strong, large-framed man who can drink deep without feeling it; but to the excitable woman her feeble limit is her husband's measure, and when he has gone beyond the range of her own short tether, she trots after him remonstrating, and thinks herself justified in interfering with his further progress. For women cannot be brought to understand the capacities of a man's life; they cannot be made to understand that what is bad for themselves may not be bad for others, and that their weakness ought not to be the gauge of a man's strength.
A pale, chilly woman, afflicted with chronic bronchitis, who wears furs and velvets in May and fears the east wind as much as an East Indian fears a tiger, does her best to coddle her husband, father, sons, in about the same ratio as she coddles herself. They must not go out without an overcoat; they must take an umbrella if the day is at all cloudy; they must not walk too far nor ride too hard; and they must be sure to be at home by a given hour.
When such women as these have to do with men just on the boundary-line