down to the
meal with a bottle of good wine, such as starts a man's thoughts (for I
am inconsistent, as I acknowledge, and that gift of civilization I
would bear with me into my hermitage). Then in the evening, with pipe
in mouth, beside my log-wood fire, I would sit and think, until new
knowledge came to me. Strengthened by those silent voices that are
drowned in the roar of Streetland, I might, perhaps, grow into something
nearer to what it was intended that a man should be--might catch a
glimpse, perhaps, of the meaning of life.

No, no, my dear lady, into this life of renunciation I would not take a
companion, certainly not of the sex you are thinking of, even would
she care to come, which I doubt. There are times when a man is better
without the woman, when a woman is better without the man. Love drags
us from the depths, makes men and women of us, but if we would climb a
little nearer to the stars we must say good-bye to it. We men and women
do not show ourselves to each other at our best; too often, I fear, at
our worst. The woman's highest ideal of man is the lover; to a man the
woman is always the possible beloved. We see each other's hearts,
but not each other's souls. In each other's presence we never shake
ourselves free from the earth. Match-making mother Nature is always at
hand to prompt us. A woman lifts us up into manhood, but there she
would have us stay. "Climb up to me," she cries to the lad, walking with
soiled feet in muddy ways; "be a true man that you may be worthy to walk
by my side; be brave to protect me, kind and tender, and true; but climb
no higher, stay here by my side." The martyr, the prophet, the leader of
the world's forlorn hopes, she would wake from his dream. Her arms she
would fling about his neck holding him down.

To the woman the man says, "You are my wife. Here is your America,
within these walls, here is your work, your duty." True, in nine hundred
and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand, but men and women are
not made in moulds, and the world's work is various. Sometimes to her
sorrow, a woman's work lies beyond the home. The duty of Mary was not to
Joseph.

The hero in the popular novel is the young man who says, "I love you
better than my soul." Our favourite heroine in fiction is the woman who
cries to her lover, "I would go down into Hell to be with you." There
are men and women who cannot answer thus--the men who dream dreams, the
women who see visions--impractica