ds there is not much mystery
about her; there are many tributes to her noble qualities, and some
pretty severe and uncomplimentary things are said about her, but there is
little affectation of not understanding her. She may be a prophetess, or
a consoler, or a snare, but she is no more "deceitful and desperately
wicked" than anybody else. There is nothing mysterious about her first
recorded performance. Eve trusted the serpent, and Adam trusted Eve. The
mystery was in the serpent. There is no evidence that the ancient
Egyptian woman was more difficult to comprehend than the Egyptian man.
They were both doubtless wily as highly civilized people are apt to be;
the "serpent of old Nile" was in them both. Is it in fact till we come to
mediaeval times, and the chivalric age, that women are set up as being
more incomprehensible than men? That is, less logical, more whimsical,
more uncertain in their mental processes? The play-writers and essayists
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries "worked" this notion
continually. They always took an investigating and speculating attitude
towards women, that fostered the conceit of their separateness and veiled
personality. Every woman was supposed to be playing a part behind a mask.
Montaigne is always investigating woman as a mystery. It is, for
instance, a mystery he does not relish that, as he says, women commonly
reserve the publication of their vehement affections for their husbands
till they have lost them; then the woful countenance "looks not so much
back as forward, and is intended rather to get a new husband than to
lament the old." And he tells this story:

"When I was a boy, a very beautiful and virtuous lady who is yet living,
and the widow of a prince, had, I know not what, more ornament in her
dress than our laws of widowhood will well allow, which being reproached
with as a great indecency, she made answer 'that it was because she was
not cultivating more friendships, and would never marry again.'" This
cynical view of woman, as well as the extravagantly complimentary one
sometimes taken by the poets, was based upon the notion that woman was an
unexplainable being. When she herself adopted the idea is uncertain. Of
course all this has a very practical bearing upon modern life, the
position of women in it, and the so-called reforms. If woman is so
different from man, to the extent of being an unexplainable mystery,
science ought to determine the exact state of the cas