ope to avoid his bitterness as carefully as his
prolixity. What was a new thing in his day has become old in ours, and
man learns perhaps somewhat too easily to acquiesce in "established
facts." It is without a dream of revolt, and simply in a philosophical
spirit, that we approach the subject. Indeed, it is a feeling of
admiration rather than of rebellion which seizes us when we begin to
reflect on the character of woman's sway, and on the simplicity of the
means by which she creates and establishes it. A little love, a little
listening, a little patience, a little persistence, and the game is won.

How charmingly natural and unobjectionable, for instance, is the very
first move in it--what we may venture to call, since we have to create
the very terminology of our subject, the Isolation of Man. When Brown
meets us in the street and hopes that his approaching marriage will make
no difference in our friendship, and that we shall see as much of one
another as before, we know that the phrases simply mean that our
intimacy is at an end. There will be no more pleasant lounges in the
morning, no more strolls in the park, no more evenings at the club.
Woman has succeeded in so completely establishing this cessation of
former friendships as a condition of the new married life that hardly
any one dreams of thinking what an enormous sacrifice it is. There are
very few men, after all, who are not dependent on their little group of
intimates for the general drift of their opinions, the general temper of
their mind and character of their lives. Their mutual advice, support,
praise or dispraise, enthusiasm, abhorrence, likings, dislikings,
constitute the atmosphere in which one lives.

A good deal of real modesty lingers about an unmarried man; he feels far
more confident in his own opinion if he knows it is Smith's opinion
too, and his conception of life acquires all its definiteness from its
being shared with half a dozen fairly reasonable fellows. It is no
slight triumph that woman should not only have succeeded in enforcing
the dissolution of this social tie as the first condition of married
life, but that she has invested that dissolution with the air of an
axiom which nobody dreams of disputing. The triumph is, as we said, won
by the simplest agency--by nothing, in short, but a dexterous double
appeal to human conceit. She is so weak, so frail, so helpless, so
strange to this new world into which she has plunged from the realm