so long withheld, she has taken her "exceptionalness" here, as elsewhere, on trust. For any wide knowledge of her own sex is, perhaps, the newest of all woman's acquisitions, Almost every woman has known certain men very well indeed. Other women have been, even for her, the enigma they remained to men.
Now we begin to see that this same sense of humour—being a "small-arm," light, and adapted to delicate handling—seems to be an even commoner blade in the feminine armoury than in that loftier hall where are ranged the heavy artillery—the crossbows and blunderbusses of the other sex.
But since woman's field of action has been the home, she found out millenniums ago that humour there makes for success only under the strictest rules.
She has learned to welcome it as a sign of unbending in her lord. She has even cultivated it (in him) by a process, pelican-like, of offering her own breast; or, to modify the figure, she made her contribution to the domestic cheer by submitting herself to be the target for his pleasantry.
She must have early seen how, when the bow is in the other hand, and her arrow finds him out, the point is so little appreciated that she has been fain to give up marksmanship.
If she needed consoling for the resultant rumour of her lack of skill, she has found it in the reflection that no man has ever been known to long for humour
