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 case, and ascertain if
there is any remedy for it. If it is only a literary creation, we ought
to know it. Science could tell, for instance, whether there is a
peculiarity in the nervous system, any complications in the nervous
centres, by which the telegraphic action of the will gets crossed, so
that, for example, in reply to a proposal of marriage, the intended "Yes"
gets delivered as "No." Is it true that the mental process in one sex is
intuitive, and in the other logical, with every link necessary and
visible? Is it true, as the romancers teach, that the mind in one sex
acts indirectly and in the other directly, or is this indirect process
only characteristic of exceptions in both sexes? Investigation ought to
find this out, so that we can adjust the fit occupations for both sexes
on a scientific basis. We are floundering about now in a sea of doubt. As
society becomes mor