ness that really claims their
earnest attention is love, making conquests, and everything connected
with this--dress, dancing, and so on.

The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is
in arriving at maturity. A man reaches the maturity of his reasoning
powers and mental faculties hardly before the age of twenty-eight; a
woman at eighteen. And then, too, in the case of woman, it is only
reason of a sort--very niggard in its dimensions. That is why women
remain children their whole life long; never seeing anything but
what is quite close to them, cleaving to the present moment, taking
appearance for reality, and preferring trifles to matters of the first
importance. For it is by virtue of his reasoning faculty that man does
not live in the present only, like the brute, but looks about him and
considers the past and the future; and this is the origin of prudence,
as well as of that care and anxiety which so many people exhibit. Both
the advantages and the disadvantages which this involves, are shared
in by the woman to a smaller extent because of her weaker power
of reasoning. She may, in fact, be described as intellectually
short-sighted, because, while she has an intuitive understanding of
what lies quite close to her, her field of vision is narrow and does
not reach to what is remote; so that things which are absent, or past,
or to come, have much less effect upon women than upon men. This is
the reason why women are more often inclined to be extravagant, and
sometimes carry their inclination to a length that borders upon
madness. In their hearts, women think that it is men's business
to earn money and theirs to spend it--- if possible during their
husband's life, but, at any rate, after his death. The very fact
that their husband hands them over his earnings for purposes of
housekeeping, strengthens them in this belief.

However many disadvantages all this may involve, there is at least
this to be said in its favor; that the woman lives more in the present
than the man, and that, if the present is at all tolerable, she enjoys
it more eagerly. This is the source of that cheerfulness which
is peculiar to women, fitting her to amuse man in his hours of
recreation, and, in case of need, to console him when he is borne down
by the weight of his cares.

It is by no means a bad plan to consult women in matters of
difficulty, as the Germans used to do in ancient times; for their way
of looking at thin