akes it, feminine intuition.
The mark of that so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurate
perception of reality, an habitual immunity to emotional enchantment,
a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance
and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a
hero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank.

The proverb that no man is a hero to his valet is obviously of masculine
manufacture. It is both insincere and untrue: insincere because it
merely masks the egotistic doctrine that he is potentially a hero to
everyone else, and untrue because a valet, being a fourth-rate man
himself, is likely to be the last person in the world to penetrate his
master's charlatanry. Who ever heard of valet who didn't envy his master
wholeheartedly? who wouldn't willingly change places with his master?
who didn't secretly wish that he was his master? A man's wife labours
under no such naive folly. She may envy her husband, true enough,
certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities. She
may envy him his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his
impenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices,
his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak
of romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she
never envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy and
preposterous soul.

This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute
understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom
of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal
instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into
his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self
delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; it
sets the whole tone of feminine fiction. The woman novelist, if she
be skillful enough to arise out of mere imitation into genuine
self-expression, never takes her heroes quite seriously. From the day
of George Sand to the day of Selma Lagerlof she has always got into
her character study a touch of superior aloofness, of ill-concealed
derision. I can't recall a single masculine figure created by a woman
who is not, at bottom, a booby.

2. Women's Intelligence

That is should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of
the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent