of
deliverance. She learns to despise the sense, the information, the
womanly reserve which fail to attract the deliverer. She has to sell
herself to purchase her freedom; and she will take very strong measures
to secure a purchaser. The fop, the fool, little knows the keen scrutiny
with which the gay creature behind her fan is taking stock of his feeble
preferences, is preparing to play upon his feebler aversions. Pitiful as
he is, it is for him that she arranges her artillery on the
toilette-table, the "little secrets," the powder bloom, the rouge
"precipitated from the damask rose-leaf," the Styrian lotion that gives
"beauty and freshness to the complexion, plumpness to the figure,
clearness and softness to the skin." He has a faint flicker of liking
for brunettes; she lays her triumphant fingers on her "walnut stain,"
and darkens into the favorite tint. He loves plumpness, and her "Sinai
Manna" is at hand to secure _embonpoint_. Belladonna flashes on him from
her eyes, Kohl and antimony deepen the blackness of her eyebrows, "bloom
of roses" blushes from her lips. She stoops to conquer, and it is no
wonder that the fop and the fool go down.

The freedom she covets comes with marriage, but it is a freedom
threatened by a thousand accidents, and threatened, above all, by
maternity. It is of little use to have bowed to slang and
shoulder-straps, if it be only to tie oneself to a cradle. The nursery
stands sadly in the way of the free development of woman; it clips her
social enjoyment, it curtails her bonnet bills. "The slavery of nursing
a child," one fair protester tells us, "only a mother knows." And so she
invents a pretty theory about the damage done to modern constitutions by
our port-drinking forefathers, and ceases to nurse at all. But even this
is only partial independence; she pants for perfect freedom from the
cares of maternity. Her tone becomes the tone of the household, and the
spouse she has won growls over each new arrival. She is quite ready to
welcome the growl. "Nature," a mother informs us, "turns restive after
the birth of two or three children," and mothers turn restive with
nature. "Whatever else you may do," she adds, "you will never persuade
us into liking to have children," and, if we did, we should not greatly
value the conversion. And so woman wins her liberty, and bows her
emphatic reply to the world's appeal, "Give us good mothers," by
declining to be a mother at all.

By the sacrifice of