et, it is their urgent
necessity; the reason for their distance, and the greater the distance
between them, the swifter will be their return and the warmer their
impact: they may shatter each other to fragments or they may fuse and
become indissoluble and new and wonderful, but there is no other
fertility. Between the sexes there is a really extraordinary freedom
of intercourse. They meet each other something more than half way. A
man and a woman may become quite intimate in a quarter of an hour.
Almost certainly they will endeavor to explain themselves to each
other before many minutes have elapsed; but a man and a man will not
do this, and even less so will a woman and a woman, for these are the
parallel lines which never meet. The acquaintanceship of the latter,
in particular, often begins and ends in an armed and calculating
neutrality. They preserve their distances and each others' suffrage by
the exercise of a grave social tact which never deserts them, and
which more than anything else has contributed to build the ceremonials
which are nearly one-half of our civilization. It is a common belief
amongst men that women cannot live together without quarreling, and
that they are unable to get work done by other women with any of the
good will which men display in the same occupations. If this is true,
the reason should not be looked for in any intersexual complications,
such as fear or an acrid rivalry, but only in the perpetually
recurring physical disturbances to which, as a sex, they are
subjected; and as the ability and willingness of a man to use his
fists in response to an affront has imposed sobriety and good humor
towards each other in almost all their relations, so women have placed
barriers of politeness and ceremonial between their fellow-women and
their own excoriated sensibilities.

Mrs. Cafferty, therefore, dissembled her disappointment, and with an
increased cordiality addressed herself towards Mary. Sitting down on
the bedside she discoursed on almost every subject upon which a woman
may discourse. It is considered that the conversation of women, while
incessant in its use, is rigorously bounded between the parlor and the
kitchen, or, to be more precise, between the attic and the scullery,
but these extremes are more inclusive than is imagined, for the attic
has an outlook on the stars while the scullery usually opens on the
kitchen garden or the dust heap--vistas equal to horizons. The
mysteries of d