It was something to be assured by my wife that the modern woman does not purpose to abolish either maternity or men, and that, so to speak, her bark is worse than her bite. Barbara belongs to a woman’s club, so she must know. We men are in such a nervous state, as a result of what Barbara calls the revolution, that very likely we are unduly sensitive and suspicious, and allow our imaginations to fly off at a tangent. Very likely, too, we are disposed to be a trifle irritable, for when one has been accustomed for long to sit on or club a person (literally or metaphorically, according to one’s social status) when she happens to express sentiments or opinions contrary to ours, it must needs take time to get used to the idea that she is really an equal, and to adjust one’s ratiocinations to suit. But even accepting as true the assurance that the forbidding air of the modern woman does not mean much, and that she loves us still though she has ceased to worship us, we have Barbara’s word for it, too, that the modern woman thinks we have made a mess of it and that man is a failure fundamentally. Love without respect! Sorrow rather than anger! It sobers one; it saddens one. For we must admit that man has had free scope and a long period in which to make the most of himself; and woman has not, which precludes us from answering back, as it were, which is always more or less of a consolation when one is brought to bay.
A tendency to compromise is certainly one of man’s characteristics. Barbara has referred to it as a salient fault--a vice, and perhaps it is, though it is writ large in the annals of civilization as conducted by man. We must at least agree that it is not woman’s way, and that she expects to do without it when we are no more or are less than we are now. Probably we have been and are too easy-going, and no one will deny that one ought at all times to have the courage of one’s convictions, even in midsummer and on purely social occasions; nevertheless it would have been trying to the nervous system and conducive to the continuance and increase of standing armies, had we favored the policy of shooting at sight those whose views on the temperance question differed from ours, or of telling the host at whose house we had passed the evening that we had been bored to death.