The Spinster Book | Page 6

irritation produced by fifteen minutes of
nagging speaks volumes for the personal influence which might be
directed the other way, and the desired result more easily obtained.
[Sidenote: Diversions]
The sun around which woman revolves is Love. Her whole life is spent
in search of it, consciously or unconsciously. Incidental diversions in
the way of "career" and "independence" are usually caused by domestic
unhappiness, or, in the case of spinsters, the fear of it.
If all men were lovers, there would be no "new woman" movement, no
sociological studies of "Woman in Business," no ponderous analyses of
"The Industrial Condition of Women" in weighty journals. Still more
than a man, a woman needs a home, though it be but the tiniest room.
Even the self-reliant woman of affairs who battles bravely by day in the
commercial arena has her little nook, made dainty by feminine touches,
to which she gladly creeps at night. Would it not be sweeter if it were
shared by one who would always love her? As truly as she needs her
bread and meat, woman needs love, and, did he but know it, man needs
it too, though in lesser degree.

[Sidenote: The Verity and the Vision]
Lacking the daily expression of it which is the sweet unction of her
hungry soul, she seeks solace in an ideal world of her own making. It is
because the verity jars upon her vision that she takes a melancholy
view of life.
One of woman's keenest pleasures is sorrow. Her tears are not all pain.
She goes to the theatre, not to laugh, but to weep. The clever
playwright who closes his last scene with a bitter parting is sure of a
large clientage, composed almost wholly of women. Sad books are
written by men, with an eye to women readers, and women dearly love
to wear the willow in print.
Women are unconscious queens of tragedy. Each one, in thought, plays
to a sympathetic but invisible audience. She lifts her daily living to a
plane of art, finding in fiction, music, pictures, and the stage continual
reminders of her own experience.
Does her husband, distraught with business cares, leave her hurriedly
and without the customary morning kiss? Woman, on her way to
market, rapidly reviews similar instances in fiction, in which this first
forgetting proved to be "the little rift within the lute."
The pictures of distracted ladies, wild as to hair and vision, are sold in
photogravure by countless thousands--to women. An attraction on the
boards which is rumoured to be "so sad," leads woman to economise in
the matter of roasts and desserts that she may go and enjoy an afternoon
of misery. Girls suffer all their lives long from being taken to mirthful
plays, or to vaudeville, which is unmixed delight to a man and
intolerably cheerful to a woman.
[Sidenote: Woman and Death]
Woman and Death are close friends in art. Opera is her greatest joy,
because a great many people are slaughtered in the course of a single
performance, and somebody usually goes raving mad for love. When
Melba sings the mad scene from Lucia, and that beautiful voice

descends by lingering half-notes from madness and nameless longing
to love and prayer, the women in the house sob in sheer delight and
clutch the hands of their companions in an ecstasy of pain.
In proportion as women enjoy sorrow, men shrink from it. A man
cannot bear to be continually reminded of the woman he has loved and
lost, while woman's dearest keepsakes are old love letters and the shoes
of a little child. If the lover or the child is dead, the treasures are never
to be duplicated or replaced, but if the pristine owner of the shoes has
grown to stalwart manhood and the writer of the love letters is a tender
and devoted husband, the sorrowful interest is merely mitigated. It is
not by any means lost.
[Sidenote: "The Eternal Womanly"]
Just why it should be considered sad to marry one's lover and for a
child to grow up, can never be understood by men. There are many
things in the "eternal womanly" which men understand about as well as
a kitten does the binomial theorem, but some mysteries become simple
enough when the leading fact is grasped--that woman's song of life is
written in a minor key and that she actually enjoys the semblance of
sorrow. Still, the average woman wishes to be idealised and strongly
objects to being understood.
[Sidenote: "Tears, Idle Tears"]
Woman's tears mean no more than the sparks from an overcharged
dynamo; they are simply emotional relief. Married men gradually come
to realise it, and this is why a suspicion of tears in his sweetheart's eyes
means infinitely more to a lover than a fit of