'Men are so dull, for the most part! They are often tender and often
loyal, but they seldom put any spiritual leaven into their
tenderness, and their loyalty is apt to be rather unimaginative.
Heigho! I wish we could make lovers as the book-writers do, by
rolling the virtues and graces of two or three men into one! I'd
almost like to be a man in this decade, a young, strong man, for
there are such splendid giants to slay! To be sure, a woman can
always buckle on the sword, and that is rather a delightful
avocation, after all; but somehow there are comparatively few men
nowadays who care greatly to wear swords or have them buckled on.
There is no inspiration in trying to buckle on the sword of a man who
never saw one, and who uses it wrong end foremost, and falls down on
it, and entangles his legs in it, and scratches his lady's hand with
it whenever he kisses her! And therefore, these things, for aught I
see, being unalterably so, I will take children's love, woman's love,
and man's friendship; man's friendship, which, if it is not life's
poetry, is credible prose, says George Meredith,--"a land of low
undulations, instead of Alps, beyond the terrors and deceptions."
That will fill to overflowing my life, already so full, and in time I
shall grow from everybody's Mistress Mary into everybody's Mother
Mary, and that will be the end of me in my present state of being.
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