talent for reproducing the current ideals has certainly been the safer exercise. 'The fact cannot be too strongly emphasised that whatever special knowledge we had, whatever was new to the world of letters or disquieting to private life, women writers kept to themselves as successfully as did the Egyptian women buried thirty centuries ago beneath those tons of granite whereon men graved their version of the ended story.
Of one form of testimonial man has been chary. Often touchingly ready to invest some woman with every gentle virtue, he has usually made an exception of humour. Some show of excuse he has had from two causes. Humour is of humble origin, ethically speaking, and seems to have been sired by cruelty—the pleasure in another's pain or loss of dignity that found diversion in the ruder kinds of horseplay. Not improbably woman's natural sympathy and her sheltering compassion may have prevented her from sharing the bumpkin view of comedy which, in the spacious times behind us, found in Jew-baiting and insanity side-splitting entertainments. Woman may be pardoned for wondering if it may not have been in part her humaner instinct about some of the stock jokes of the race that earned her the reputation of a constitutional lack of humour.
In these slightly more enlightened days, when the less inarticulate—called by men "the exceptional woman"— has been allowed this quality of humour
