t certainly is surprising, now and then, to find how long the most
intense female vanity will lie, in some out-of-the-way corner of
character, hidden from the eye. Perhaps we ought to say, the male eye,
for women seem to discover each other's weak points by a power of
intuition that amounts almost to instinct. But a man is amazed to find
that a woman whose vanity he believed himself to have tracked into all
its channels has it, after all, most strongly in some channel of which
he previously knew nothing. He has perhaps considered her a sensible
matter-of-fact woman, vain perhaps, though not unpardonably, of her
capacity for business and knowledge of the world, but singularly free
from the not uncommon female tendency to believe that every man who sees
her is in love with her; and he unexpectedly discovers that she has for
years considered herself the object of a desperate passion on the part
of the parish rector, a prosaic middle-aged gentleman of ample waistcoat
and large family, and is a little uneasy about being left alone in the
same room with the butler.

Unexpected discoveries of some such kind as this not unnaturally
popularize the theory already mentioned, that such a being as a woman
without vanity does not exist--that, no matter how securely the weakness
may lie hidden from observation, it does somewhere or other exist, and
some day will out. But we are inclined, notwithstanding, to hold that,
here and there, but happily very seldom, there are to be found women
really without vanity; and most unpleasant women they seem to us, as a
rule, to be. They get on tolerably well with their own sex, for they are
rarely pretty or affected, and they have usually certain solid,
serviceable qualities which make up for not being attractive by standing
wear and tear. But in their relations with men--as soon, that is, as
they have secured a husband, and fascination has therefore ceased to be
a matter of business, a practical question of bread-and-butter, to be
grappled with in the spirit in which they would, if necessary, go out
charing, or keep a mangle--they are painfully devoid of that eagerness
to please and that readiness to be pleased which, in the present
imperfect state of civilization, are among woman's chief charms.

Even men cannot, as a rule, get on very well without these qualities;
but still to please is not man's mission in the sense in which it is
generally considered to be woman's, and probably will continue t