ar line of knowledge, and
throws himself on her mercy. Mentally, I at once began to feel motherly
towards Percival, and clucked around him like an old hen. He went on to
say that men often are not so blind that they cannot see the prejudices
and complexities of a woman's nature, but they are not constituted to
understand them by intuition as women understand men. "The masculine
mind," he said, "is but ill-attuned to the subtle harmonies of the
feminine heart."

I was secretly very much pleased at this remark, but I made myself answer
as became an Old Maid, just to make him continue without
self-consciousness. If I had blushed and thanked him, he would have gone
home.

"They set these things down to the natural curiousness and contrariness
of women, and often despise what they cannot comprehend."

He answered me with the heightened consciousness and slight irritation of
a man who has been in that fault, but has seen and mended it.

"All men do not. Still, how can they help it at times?"

Then, Tabby, I went a-sailing. I launched out on my favorite theme.

"Men must needs study women. Often the terror with which some men regard
these--to us--perfectly transparent complexities, could be avoided if they
would analyze the cause with but half the patience they display in the
case of an ailing trotter. But no; either they edge carefully away from
such dangers as they previously have experienced, or, if they blunder into
new ones, they give the woman a sealskin and trust to time to heal the
breach."

I thought of the Asburys when I said that. But Percival ruminated upon it,
as if it touched his own case. A very good thing about Percival is that
he does not think he knows everything. It encourages me to believe in his
genius. To rouse him from a brown-study over this Flossy girl, I said
rather recklessly,

"I should like to be a man for a while, in order to make love to two or
three women. I would do it in a way which should not shock them with its
coarseness or starve them with its poverty. As it is now, most women deny
themselves the expression of the best part of their love, because they
know it will be either a puzzle or a terror to their lovers."

Percival was vitally interested at once.

"Is that really so?" he asked. "Do you suppose any of them withhold
anything from such a fear?" His face was so uplifted that I plunged on,
thoroughly in the dark, but, like Barkis, "willin'." If I could be of use
to him in an