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WOMAN'S SECRET
11

in his nearest relations, least of all in the wife of his bosom.

The notion that woman is without this faculty is merely one of the many ways in which men advertise her success in keeping her mental processes to herself. A slave's accomplishment, perhaps. Certainly women have learnt few lessons as well.

What wonder that the age we live in is significant and revolutionary beyond any other, since for the first time since civilisation's dawn the world is beginning—barely beginning—to be told what the secretive half of the human race really thinks and feels.

That we are not monkeys disporting ourselves in trees is due, so say the wise, to the home-making proclivities of one branch of the anthropoid family. This home-making proclivity was nothing else than the female's instinct to provide the best possible environment for her young—an added tenderness for those weakest breeding in her an added inventiver ness.

This was the frail-seeming but sure foundation on which arose the many mansions of human achievement.

A case might be made out by anyone so foolish as to wish to divide responsibility and to apportion merit—a case to prove that civilisation is peculiarly women's affair. Certainly we fail to see how the upbuilding of the race could have come about without its passing through two phases, which owed their initiation not to masculine but to femi-