The mothers of Professors were indulged in the practice of jumping at conclusions, and were praised for their impatience of the slow process of reason.
Professors have written of the mental habits of women as though they accumulated generation by generation upon women, and passed over their sons.Professors take it for granted, obviously by some process other than the slow process of reason, that women derive from their mothers and grandmothers, and men from their fathers and grandfathers.This, for instance, was written lately: "This power [it matters not what] would be about equal in the two sexes but for the influence of heredity, which turns the scale in favour of the woman, as for long generations the surroundings and conditions of life of the female sex have developed in her a greater degree of the power in question than circumstances have required from men." "Long generations" of subjection are, strangely enough, held to excuse the timorousness and the shifts of women to-day.But the world, unknowing, tampers with the courage of its sons by such a slovenly indulgence.It tampers with their intelligence by fostering the ignorance of women.
And yet Shakespeare confessed the participation of man and woman in their common heritage.It is Cassius who speaks:
"Have you not love enough to bear with me When that rash humour which my mother gave me Makes me forgetful?"And Brutus who replies:
"Yes, Cassius, and from henceforth When you are over-earnest with your Brutus He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so."Dryden confessed it also in his praises of Anne Killigrew:
"If by traduction came thy mind, Our wonder is the less to find A soul so charming from a stock so good.
Thy father was transfused into thy blood."The winning of Waterloo upon the Eton playgrounds is very well; but there have been some other, and happily minor, fields that were not won - that were more or less lost.Where did this loss take place, if the gains were secured at football? This inquiry is not quite so cheerful as the other.But while the victories were once going forward in the playground, the defeats or disasters were once going forward in some other place, presumably.And this was surely the place that was not a playground, the place where the future wives of the football players were sitting still while their future husbands were playing football.
This is the train of thought that followed the grey figure of a woman on a bicycle in Oxford Street.She had an enormous and top-heavy omnibus at her back.All the things on the near side of the street - the things going her way - were going at different paces, in two streams, overtaking and being overtaken.The tributary streets shot omnibuses and carriages, cabs and carts - some to go her own way, some with an impetus that carried them curving into the other current, and other some making a straight line right across Oxford Street into the street opposite.Besides all the unequal movement, there were the stoppings.It was a delicate tangle to keep from knotting.The nerves of the mouths of horses bore the whole charge and answered it, as they do every day.
The woman in grey, quite alone, was immediately dependent on no nerves but her own, which almost made her machine sensitive.But this alertness was joined to such perfect composure as no flutter of a moment disturbed.There was the steadiness of sleep, and a vigilance more than that of an ordinary waking.
