strictly secular kind.

There is, for instance, a popular and prevalent fallacy that women ought
to be submissive to, and governed by, their lords and masters. In
feminine fiction we see a very wholesome reaction against this mistaken
supposition. The hero of the female tale is often a poor, frivolous,
easily led person. When he can escape from his wife's eye, he speculates
heavily on Stock Exchange, goes in under the influence of evil advisers
for any sort of polite swindling, and forgets, or is ill-tempered
towards, the inestimable treasure he has at home. On such occasions the
heroine of the feminine novel shines out in all her majesty. She is kind
and patient to her husband's faults, except that when he is more than
usually idiotic her eyes flash, and her nostrils dilate with a sort of
grand scorn, while her knowledge of life and business is displayed at
critical moments to save him from ruin. When every one else deserts him,
she takes a cab into the city, and employs some clever friend, who has
always been hopelessly in love with her--and for whom she entertains,
unknown to her husband, a Platonic brotherly regard--to intervene in the
nick of time, and to arrest her husband's fall.

In a story called _Sowing the Wind_, which has recently been published,
the authoress (for we assume, in spite of the ambiguous assertion on the
title-page, that the pen which wrote it was not really a man's) goes to
very great lengths. The hero, St. John Aylott, is always snubbing and
lecturing Isola, whom he married when she was half a child, and whom he
treats as a child long after she has become a great and glorious woman.
He administers the doctrine of conjugal authority to her in season and
out of season, and his object is to convert her into a loving feminine
slave. Against this revolting theory her nature rebels. Though she
preserves her wifely attachment to a man whom she has once thought
worthy of better things, her respect dies away, and at last she openly
defies him when he wants her, in contravention of her plain duty, not to
adopt as her son a deserted orphan-boy. At this point her character
stands out in noble contrast to his. She does adopt the boy, and brings
him to live with her in spite of all; and when St. John is unnaturally
peevish at its childish squalling, Isola bears his fretful
animadversions with a patient dignity that touches the hearts of all
about her.

Any husband who can go on preaching about conjugal o