ly always contented with the atmosphere that is. When
he rebels, his tendency is to destroy the old sanctuary, hers to build a
new sanctuary. That is a form of idealism,--not a very high idealism,
for woman seldom strains toward the impossible. In literature I cannot
call to mind that woman has ever conceived a Utopia such as those
imagined by Bellamy, Samuel Butler, William Morris, and H. G. Wells. The
only woman who voiced ideas of this kind was Mary Wollstonecraft, and
her views were hardly utopian. Nothings, such as Utopias, have been
always too airy for woman. The heroes in the novels she has written,
until recently and with one or two exceptions,--such as some of the
heroes of George Eliot,--are either stagey or sweet. Mr. Rochester is
stagey, Grandcourt is stagey, while the hero of "Under Two Flags" is
merely Turkish Delight.

3

A quality which singularly contrasts with woman's vague idealism is the
accuracy she displays in business. This is due to her being
fundamentally inaccurate. It is not the accurate people who are always
accurate; it is the inaccurate people on their guard.[3] Woman's
interest in the particular predisposes her to the exact, for accuracy
may be defined as a continuous interest in the particular. I suspect
that it indicates a probability that by education, and especially
encouragement, woman may develop a far higher degree of concentration
than she has hitherto done. In her way stands a fatal facility, that of
grasping ideas before they are half-expressed. It is a quality of
imagination, natural rather than induced. Any schoolteacher will confirm
the statement that in a mixed class, aged eleven to twelve, the essays
of the girls are better than those of the boys. This is not so in a
mixed university. I suspect that this latter is quite as much due to the
academic judgment, which does not recognize imagination, as to the fact
that in the later years of their lives the energies of girls are
diverted from intellectual concentration (and also expression) toward
the artistic and the social. This untrained concentration produces a
certain superficiality and an impetuousness which harmonize with the
intrusion of side issues,--to which I have referred,--and with the
burgeoning of side issues on the general idea.

[3] I have observed for two years the steady growth in the accuracy of
the work of Case 33, due to her having concentrated upon her instinctive
inaccuracy.--THE AUTHOR.

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