oints
of her guests, to lead up to their subjects, to supply points for
conversation, and then to leave it quietly alone. But it is only a
display on the grand scale of that particular faculty of silence which
wins its quiet triumphs on every hearth-rug.

The faculty, however, has other triumphs to win besides those in which
it figures as a delicate administration of flattery to the vanity of
men. It is the force which woman holds in reserve for the hour of
revolt. For it must be owned that, pleasant as the tyranny is, men
sometimes wake up to the fact that it is a tyranny, that in the most
seductive way in the world they are being wheedled out of associations
that are really dear to them, that their life is being cramped and
confined, that their aims are being lowered. Then the newly-found
eloquence exhausts itself in a declaration of revolt.

Things cannot go on in this way, life cannot be ruined for caprices. It
is needless, perhaps, to repeat the rhetoric of rebellion, and all the
more needless because it shares the fate of all rhetoric in producing
not the slightest impression on the mind to which it is addressed. The
wife simply listens as before, though the listening is now far from
encouraging to eloquence. She is perfectly patient, patient in her
refusal to continue an irritating discussion, patient in bearing your
little spurts of vexation; she listens quietly to-day, with the air of
one who is perfectly prepared to listen quietly to-morrow. But even
rhetoric has its limits, and now that the cues have ceased, a husband
finds it a little difficult to keep up a discussion where he has to
supply both arguments and replies.

Moreover, the tact which managed in former days to place him in a highly
pleasant position by the confession of weakness, now, by the very same
silent avowal, places him in a decidedly unpleasant one. If a woman's
air simply says at the end of it all, "I can't answer you, but I know I
am right," a man has a lurking sense that his copious rhetoric has had a
smack of the cowardly as well as of the tyrannical about it. And so,
after a vigorous denunciation of some particular thing which his wife
has done, a husband commonly finds himself no further than before; and
the very instant that, from sheer weariness, he ceases, the wife usually
steals out and does it again.

There is something feline about this combination of perfect patience
with quiet persistence--a combination which the Jesuits on