al life. The dual life is
led solely by men, and until women have found out its full compass and
meaning, they can never lead in the world. There is the public life and
the private; and the men who are most successful in the former are the
most exclusive in the latter. Women have only learned to lead one life;
they must be all public or all private, there is no medium. Those who
give up the private life for which Providence destined them, to assume
the public existence to which their own conceit urges them, have their
own reward. They taste all the bitterness of fame and never know its
sweets, because the bitterness is public and the sweets are private.

Women cannot understand that part of a man's life which brings him into
daily contact with men whom he does not bring home to dinner. One woman
does not know another without bringing her in to meals and showing her
her new hat. It is merely a matter of custom. Men are in the habit of
associating in daily, almost hourly, intercourse with others who are
never really their friends and are always held at a distance. It is
useless attempting to explain it, for we are merely reprimanded for
unfriendliness, stiffness, and stupid pride. Soit! Let it go. Some of
us, perhaps, know our own business best. And there are, thank Heaven!
amidst a multitude of female doctors, female professors, female
wranglers, a few female women left.

Jack Meredith knew quite well what he was about when he listened with
a favourable ear to Durnovo's scheme. He knew that this man was not a
gentleman, but his own position was so assured that he could afford
to associate with any one. Here, again, men are safer. A woman is too
delicate a social flower to be independent of environments. She takes
the tone of her surroundings. It is, one notices, only the ladies who
protest that the barmaid married in haste and repented of at leisure
can raise herself to her husband's level. The husband's friends keep
silence, and perhaps, like the mariner's bird, they meditate all the
more.

What Meredith proposed to do was to enter into a partnership with Victor
Durnovo, and when the purpose of it was accomplished, to let each man go
his way. Such partnerships are entered into every day. Men have carried
through a brilliant campaign--a world-affecting scheme--side by side,
working with one mind and one heart; and when the result has been
attained they drop out of each other's lives for ever. They are created
so, for