ngs that look as superficial as powder, and are really as
rooted as hair.

In all the old flowery and pastoral love-songs, those of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries especially, you will find a perpetual reproach
against woman in the matter of her coldness; ceaseless and stale similes
that compare her eyes to northern stars, her heart to ice, or her bosom
to snow. Now most of us have always supposed these old and iterant
phrases to be a mere pattern of dead words, a thing like a cold
wall-paper. Yet I think those old cavalier poets who wrote about the
coldness of Chloe had hold of a psychological truth missed in nearly all
the realistic novels of today. Our psychological romancers perpetually
represent wives as striking terror into their husbands by rolling on the
floor, gnashing their teeth, throwing about the furniture or poisoning
the coffee; all this upon some strange fixed theory that women are what
they call emotional. But in truth the old and frigid form is much nearer
to the vital fact. Most men if they spoke with any sincerity would
agree that the most terrible quality in women, whether in friendship,
courtship or marriage, was not so much being emotional as being
unemotional.

There is an awful armor of ice which may be the legitimate protection of
a more delicate organism; but whatever be the psychological explanation
there can surely be no question of the fact. The instinctive cry of the
female in anger is noli me tangere. I take this as the most obvious and
at the same time the least hackneyed instance of a fundamental quality
in the female tradition, which has tended in our time to be almost
immeasurably misunderstood, both by the cant of moralists and the cant
of immoralists. The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live
in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we
will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity. Whatever
else it is, it is the thing which a thousand poets and a million lovers
have called the coldness of Chloe. It is akin to the classical, and is
at least the opposite of the grotesque. And since we are talking here
chiefly in types and symbols, perhaps as good an embodiment as any of
the idea may be found in the mere fact of a woman wearing a skirt. It is
highly typical of the rabid plagiarism which now passes everywhere for
emancipation, that a little while ago it was common for an "advanced"
woman to claim the right to wear trou