Very young girls love to look
forward to the moment when they shall be able to "think" of what has
happened, after they have met men they are inclined to like, and who
interest them. But when the time really comes they hardly ever think
at all. They see pictures, they hear voices, they feel again what they
have felt, they laugh, they shed tears all alone, and they believe
they are thinking, or even reasoning. Their little joys come back to
them, the little triumphs of their vanity, and also all the little
hurts their sensitiveness has suffered, and which men do not often
guess and still more rarely understand.
There must be some original reason why all boys call girls silly, and
all girls think boys stupid. It must be part of the first
manifestation of that enormous difference which exists between the
point of view of men and women in after life.
Women are, in a sense, the embodiment of practice, while men are the
representatives of theory. In practice, in a race for life, the runner
who jumps everything in his way is always right, unless he breaks his
neck. In theory, he is as likely to break his neck at the first jump
as at the second, and the chances of his coming to grief increase
quickly, always in theory, as he grows tired. So theory says that it
is safer never to jump at all, but to go round through the gates, or
wade ignominiously through the water.
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