he disease. She
has to be an optimist to the morbid husband, a salutary pessimist to the
happy-go-lucky husband. She has to prevent the Quixote from being put
upon, and the bully from putting upon others. The French King wrote--

"Toujours femme varie Bien fol qui s'y fie,"

but the truth is that woman always varies, and that is exactly why we
always trust her. To correct every adventure and extravagance with its
antidote in common-sense is not (as the moderns seem to think) to be
in the position of a spy or a slave. It is to be in the position
of Aristotle or (at the lowest) Herbert Spencer, to be a universal
morality, a complete system of thought. The slave flatters; the complete
moralist rebukes. It is, in short, to be a Trimmer in the true sense of
that honorable term; which for some reason or other is always used in a
sense exactly opposite to its own. It seems really to be supposed that
a Trimmer means a cowardly person who always goes over to the stronger
side. It really means a highly chivalrous person who always goes over
to the weaker side; like one who trims a boat by sitting where there are
few people seated. Woman is a trimmer; and it is a generous, dangerous
and romantic trade.

The final fact which fixes this is a sufficiently plain one. Supposing
it to be conceded that humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in
dividing itself into two halves, respectively typifying the ideals of
special talent and of general sanity (since they are genuinely difficult
to combine completely in one mind), it is not difficult to see why the
line of cleavage has followed the line of sex, or why the female became
the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior.
Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who
frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially
prominent in experiment and adventure; and second, that the same natural
operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be
taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught
a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly,
woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time
when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there
aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a
specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment
(even when freed from modern rules and hours, and ex