ence
that trash pays better than good music for her own special purposes; and
when these purposes are attained she throws good music and bad music
aside with a perfect impartiality. It is with a certain feeling of
equity, as well as of content, that the betrothed one resigns her sway
over the keys. She has played and won, and now she holds it hardly fair
that she should interfere with other people's game. So she lounges into
a corner, and leaves her Broadwood to those who have practical work to
do. Her _role_ in life has no need of accomplishments, and as for the
serious study of music as an art, as to any real love of it or loyalty
to it, that is the business of "professional people," and not of British
mothers. Only she would have her girls remember that nothing is in
better taste than for young people to show themselves artistic.

Music only displays on the grand scale the laws which in less obtrusive
form govern the whole aesthetic life of woman. Painting, for instance,
dwindles in her hands into the "sketch;" the brown sands in the
foreground, the blue wash of the sea, and the dab of rock behind. Not a
very lofty or amusing thing, one would say at first sight; but, if one
thinks of it, an eminently practical thing, rapid and easy of execution,
not mewing the artist up in solitary studio, but lending itself
gracefully to picnics and groups of a picturesque sort on cliff and
boulder, and whispered criticism from faces peeping over one's shoulder.
Serious painting woman can leave comfortably to Academicians and
rough-bearded creatures of the Philip Firmin type, though even here she
feels, as she glances round the walls of the Academy, that she is
creating art as she is creating music. She dwells complacently on the
home tendencies of modern painting, on the wonderful succession of
squares of domestic canvas, on the nursemaid carrying children up
stairs in one picture, on the nursemaid carrying children down stairs in
the next. She has her little crow of triumph over the great artist who
started with a lofty ideal, and has come down to painting the red
stockings of little girls in green-baize pews, or the wonderful
counterpanes and marvellous bed-curtains of sleeping innocents. She
knows that the men who are forced to paint these things growl contempt
over their own creations, but the very growl is a tribute to woman's
supremacy. It is a great thing when woman can wring from an artist a
hundred "pot-boilers," while man