robably any other living man.

"No, sir," he rumbled, "you cannot find to-day a cigar-smoking animal"
(though the Colonel is so erudite a man, his language is terrible) "who
could be lured into the pages of our women novelists without
snorts--snorts, sir--of disgust, or bellows of derisive mirth. Why?
Because these pages no longer contain an acute transcript of life as
only a sensitive feminine mind would have the cunning to observe it,
and of a form of human life in itself highly feminine in its character,
but they now present a singularly insular travesty of man, an
unconscious caricature of man as he could only appear to a feminine
mind bound by the romantic limitations of sex, a mind, that is, devoid
of masculine understanding, unable to recognise by virtue of
affiliation of instinct that which is fine in the male character and
that which is false to type.

"Sir," continued the Colonel, "these pictures are coloured, on one
hand, by ludicrous prejudice against masculine qualities which the
feminine nature temperamentally feels to be antagonistic, or dangerous,
to itself; and, on the other hand, by sentimental worship of masculine
attributes conceived to be desirable complements to the frailty of
women. This amusing view of man springs not only from the element of
sex, as I have said, but from the very marrow of sex. We do not get
from the contemporary authoress creative literature at all; that is, a
disinterested criticism of mankind; we get in each picture of a male
character her instinctive, and intensely interested, feeling as to
whether or not he is a man whom it would be desirable, and safe, for a
young woman to marry. Paradoxically enough, it would seem that women
have less and less knowledge of the world as they have contrived to see
more of it; that as they have become more emancipated in liberty of
action they have become more clannish in thought; and that as the range
of their opportunities has widened and their interests have multiplied,
their concern with the most elemental female instinct, their
preoccupation with their immemorial business of the chase, has but
intensified. By word of mouth the modern woman tells us that in her
practical and intellectual capacities she has advanced far beyond her
sisters of an earlier day; we chance to look into that pool of fiction
wherein she mirrors her heart, and we find her the same self-centred
huntress as of yore.

"Sir," cried the Colonel, jolting some to