nvariably lie upon the stand, and the whole effort of
a barrister who has one for a client is devoted to keeping her within
bounds, that the obtuse suspicions of the male jury may not be unduly
aroused. Women litigants almost always win their cases, not, as is
commonly assumed, because the jurymen fall in love with them, but simply
and solely because they are clear-headed, resourceful, implacable and
without qualms.

What is here visible in the halls of justice, in the face of a vast
technical equipment for combating mendacity, is ten times more obvious
in freer fields. Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a serious
controversy with a woman, say in the departments of finance, theology
or amour, must inevitably carry away from it a sense of having passed
through a dangerous and almost gruesome experience. Women not only bite
in the clinches; they bite even in open fighting; they have a dental
reach, so to speak, of amazing length. No attack is so desperate that
they will not undertake it, once they are aroused; no device is so
unfair and horrifying that it stays them. In my early days, desiring to
improve my prose, I served for a year or so as reporter for a newspaper
in a police court, and during that time I heard perhaps four hundred
cases of so-called wife-beating. The husbands, in their defence, almost
invariably pleaded justification, and some of them told such tales of
studied atrocity at the domestic hearth, both psychic and physical, that
the learned magistrate discharged them with tears in his eyes and the
very catchpolls in the courtroom had to blow their noses. Many more men
than women go insane, and many more married men than single men. The
fact puzzles no one who has had the same opportunity that I had to find
out what goes on, year in and year out, behind the doors of apparently
happy homes. A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do),
can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the
gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often,
and perhaps Almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an
ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to
bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and
stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of
a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings
of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour--all these
things mu