 | "The Woman Behind the Man" |  |
The Woman
Behind the Man
by Richard Le Gallienne
Thus is a man created — to do all his work for some woman, Do it for her and her only, only to lay at her feet; Yet in his talk to pretend, shyly and fiercely maintain it, That all is for love of the work — toil just for love of the toil. Yet was there never a battle, but side by side with the soldiers, Stern like the serried corn, fluttered the souls of the women, As in and out through the corn go the blue-eyed shapes of the flowers; Yet was there never a strength but a woman's softness upheld it, Never a Thebes of our dreams but it rose to the music of woman — Iron and stone it might stand, but the women had breathed on the building; Yea, no man shall make or unmake, ere some woman hath made him a man.
GREAT men are impossible without great women. Behind all masculine greatness there is always present some woman as a part of the process.
Sometimes it is a woman who might well have been great on her own account, had she not preferred to submerge her own gifts and ambitions in those of son, husband, or brother. Into the mysterious crucible of genius she has chosen to throw as a most precious ingredient her own heart's blood, and too often her tears. She has been content to be the unseen oil that feeds the glittering flame, and far too often this ministry of hers has been taken for granted by its beneficiaries, or has been acknowledged in some patronizing foot-note in the biographies of the great.
Some great men, such as Goethe or Byron, might be said to be devourers of women. They have absorbed their essences into themselves as so much celestial food, ruthlessly used up their devotion, and cast them aside like empty vessels. Perhaps neither the devourer; nor the world that worships them have realized the nature and the all-importance of this sacrificial gift of woman. Possibly they have considered it as accidental, and not really necessary; have considered that they themselves were great anyway. If so, theirs was a grievous and most ungrateful illusion.
No man has ever been great merely by his own strength. The greatest brain would lie idle without woman to supply it with motive power, either by her beauty, or her goodness, or her own spiritual and intellectual influence. Creation even in the world of the mind is a dual process. However solitary the thinker, his thought is not born of himself alone. The brain of man would seem to need the impregnation of feminine influence in some form or another before it can give birth to its brain-children.
"Without women nothing is possible," wrote Castiglione, himself inspired by Elisabetta Gonzaga, one of the great women of the Italian Renaissance, "either in military courage, or art, or poetry, or music, or philosophy, or even religion. God is truly seen only through them."
And in our own time John Stuart Mill formulated, from his own experience with his remarkable and dearly loved wife, this
Who can tell how many of the original thoughts put forth by male writers belong to a woman by suggestion, to themselves only by verifying and working out? If I may judge by my own case, a very large proportion indeed.
The noble dedication to his great book "On Liberty" makes this inspiring acknowledgment of his indebtedness:
To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings — the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward — I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me.
Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one-half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to arise from anything I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivaled wisdom.
This must not be taken merely as a burst of affection. There is no doubt that it represented the actual experience of one whose life from childhood had been an unusual training in hard thinking; and it may be taken as representative, rather than exceptional, in the history of men of genius.
No less lofty a scientist than Galileo owed a debt scarcely less great to a well-loved daughter, a vivacious young nun, Sister Celeste, whose delightful letters to her father were published in 1891.
"I pride myself," she says in one of these, "that I love and revere my dearest father more, by far, than others love their fathers, and I clearly perceive that, in return, he far surpasses the greater part of other fathers in the love which he has for me, his loved daughter."
The letters are not merely full of gay daughterly tenderness and womanly "mothering" touches, but reveal, too, the active intellectual sympathy between father and daughter, and the very real strength and inspiration she brought him in dark hours, when, but for her, he might have faltered before the menacing superstitions he was to destroy. Her death clearly revealed how much he had leaned upon her, and his own soon followed.
"I continually hear," he wrote to a friend, "myself called by my dearly beloved daughter."
For my present purpose, I prefer to set aside, as suffering from no lack of full acknowledgment, the part played by woman's beauty in the processes of greatness. It is indeed rather irrelevant to my theme; for beauty is an impersonal quality, a quality which woman shares with the moon, a serious rival, and many other objects and aspects of nature. Woman's beauty shines alike on the just and the unjust, and makes poets and artists and murderers with a divine indifference.
Though the beauty of Lais and Phryne made great sculptors of Apelles and Praxiteles, the obligation of those great artists to those fair women is not the kind I am thinking of. The inspiration and influence I mean is a more human thing, a generously exerted sympathy and comradeship, an inexhaustible treasure of succor and self-sacrifice; the kind of help, as we are speaking of the women of antiquity, that Aspasia brought to Pericles, the kind of help that Aurelia, as mother brought to Julius Caesar, that Livia, as wife, brought to Augustus, and, as mother, brought to Tiberius; that Octavia, as sister, brought to Augustus also; the kind of help that even a mother-in-law has sometimes given, as in the case of Cicero and his mother-in-law, Laelia.
How much have great statesmen, from Pericles to Gladstone and Disraeli, owed to the devotion and intellectual fraternalism, so to say, of women! Even Bismarck attributed his successes to his wife, Johanna von Puttkammer. The men of iron and the men of the moon alike have been eager to admit that it was woman that made them, and not they themselves. It is more than likely that Columbus would never have discovered America had it not been for the championship of Queen Isabella of Castile; and such wisdom as was in the pompous head of Louis XIV was rather Mme. de Maintenon's than his own.
Mothers, wives, sweethearts, and sisters — as history over and over again illustrates — it is to these angels that nature has given charge concerning those strange children, its men of genius; be they soldiers, statesmen, poets, artists, or even saints.
Saints no less illustrious than St. Jerome and St. Francis were enabled to accomplish their momentous life-work only by what might well be called the celestial inspiration and assistance of pious and learned women. St. Jerome's Latin version of the Scriptures,, known as the Vulgate-as also
What Paula and Eustochium were to St. Jerome was the Italian maiden, Chiara Schiffi of Assisi, known as St. Clara, to St. Francis.
"She defended Francis," says the saint's biographer Sabatier, "not only against others, but against himself. In those hours of dark discouragement which so often and so profoundly disturb the noblest souls and sterilize the grandest efforts, she was beside him to show the way. When he doubted his mission and thought of fleeing to the heights of repose and solitary prayer, it was she who showed him the ripening harvest with no reapers to gather it in, men going astray with no shepherd to herd them, and drew him once again into the train of the Galilean, into the number of those who give their lives as a ransom for many."
Similar is the story of St. Benedict and his twin sister Scholastica.
Another son of the church, whose estrangement from her was more superficial than fundamental, and whose criticism of the letter of Christianity has long since resulted in an aggrandizement of its spirit, Ernest Renan, would never have been able even to begin his life-work had it not been for the devotion of another "sister friend," his own elder sister Henriette. One of the most beautiful things in literature is Renan's record of that devotion in his memoir of her, accompanied by their letters to each other.
"Although," he says, "lives nobly lived stand in no need of recollection, save by God himself, I should be all the more to blame were I to leave this duty to my sister Henriette unperformed, because I alone know all the treasures of that elect, soul. Her timidity, her reserve, her fixed opinion that a woman's life should be a hidden one, cast a veil over her rare qualities which few were permitted to lift. Her existence was one succession of acts of devotion, destined to remain unknown."
Henriette was twelve years old when Ernest Renan was born, and their father's death, when she was but seventeen, left the upbringing of her little brother almost entirely to her. She also took upon her heroic young shoulders the liquidation of her father's debts, to provide for which, and for her brother's education, she became a school-teacher, finally exiling herself for many years as a governess in Poland. Though thus separated from him, she kept a constant eye upon Ernest's intellectual and spiritual training, encouraging him in his first aspirations toward the priesthood, though her own mind was already in that path of freedom which he was later to find for himself.
When, finally, at the age of twenty-three, he left the seminary of St. Sulpice, unable any longer to reconcile his conscience with his chosen vocation, Henriette returned to Paris, and the two set up house together, thus beginning that idyl of sister-and-brother friendship which was to last, unbroken even by his marriage, till her death. Not only did she take upon herself the management of their domestic affairs, but her fine scholarship enabled her to assist him materially in all branches of his work, and he has paid a special tribute to her influence upon that literary style which was one of the most effective of his accomplishments. The picture he gives of their tranquil lives together in "a small apartment at the bottom of a garden near the Val de Grace" is full of charm:
She had the extremest respect for my work; I have known her sit of an evening for hours by my side, holding her breath lest she should disturb me. Yet she liked to see me, and the door between our two rooms was always open. So perfect was the union of our minds that we scarcely needed to communicate our thoughts. She surpassed me in knowledge on many points of modern history, which she had studied at the fountainhead.
The general plan of my career, the scheme of inflexible sincerity I had mapped out, was so essentially the combined product of our two consciences, that, had I been tempted to fail in any particular of it, she, like a second self, would have been found beside me to call me back to duty. Thus her influence in my mental sphere was very great. She was my incomparable amanuensis. She copied all my works, and understood them so thoroughly that I could trust to her as to the living index of my own intelligence.
The friendship of brother and sister is perhaps the most perfect of human relationships,
Some brothers and sisters are as inseparable in their immortality as in their lives. Charles and Mary Lamb, for example, whose names come together as naturally on our tongues as the names of two members of the same firm. "Bridget Elia" is as well-known to us as "Elia" himself, and their story has appealed the more to humanity because the brother's self-sacrificing love for the sister has at least as large a share in it as the sister's affection for the brother. When that tragic cloud of madness fell over his sister's mind, a cloud that was intermittently to shadow their joint lives till the end, Charles, in devoting his life to her care, to the extent even of putting from his thoughts forever the possible love of wife and children, felt that he was but repaying Mary for the care she had first given him as a lonely boy, for Mary was ten years his senior. Says he in one of his poems:
Thou to me didst ever showFondest affection, and would ofttimes lend
An ear to my desponding, love-sick lay,
Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay
But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,
Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.
His great friend, Wordsworth, was similarly blessed with a sister who fostered a genius for which the world was far from bringing a ready welcome; and she, like Mary Lamb, had no small literary gifts of her own. Wordsworth, indeed, owed much to the women of his household. His nephew has put it on record thus:
If Providence had not blessed him with a wife, a sister, a wife's sister, and a daughter, whose lives were bound up in his life, as his was in theirs, and who felt what the world was slow in admitting — that his poems were destined for immortality, and that it was no small privilege to be instrumental in conveying them to posterity — it is probable that many of his verses, muttered by him on the roads, or on the hills, or on the terrace-walks of his own garden, would have been scattered to the winds.
Literary men seem to have been particularly fortunate in their sisters. Their indebtedness to the adoring and understanding sister is incalculable. The reader may recall the absurd _Mr. Sapsea_ in Charles Dickens's "Edwin Drood," and remember how his wife, in an attitude of abject admiration, used to address him as "O thou!" Well, all great men, in the adolescent stage, stand in need, as a vital condition of their development, of such nutritive worship. Men grow great — at the beginning, at all events — by being told that they are great. A certain egoism is inseparable from greatness. Nothing is done without a belief in oneself, and in the early stages of greatness, before a confirming audience has been won, that self-belief has often to fight hard for its existence against despondency and discouragement. How priceless, then, at that period to the man of genius is the devoted being who believes in him, the divining love, prophetic in its admiration of the future fame, ever ready with that inspiring "O thou!"
How many darling, self-effacing sisters have been thus ready with their "O thou! for their big, important brothers through the ages.
Another such sister was she who had Sir Philip Sidney for brother — Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, for whom Ben Jonson wrote so splendid an epitaph:
Underneath this sable hearseLies the subject of all verse —
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother.
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Learned and fair and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.
The shaping of one of the rarest of English souls was undoubtedly Mary Sidney's, and the picture of the noble sister and brother together in the old manor-house garden at Wilton — Philip at work on his famous romance of "Arcadia," undertaken at her bidding — is one of those perfect historic memories that help to keep pure the heart of Time. So identified with each other were brother and sister that when the "Arcadia" was published it was described on the title-page as "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia."
Another conspicuous monument of literature nearer to our own time, Macaulay's "History of England," is ours partly because Macaulay, who never married, found his lifelong friend in his sister Hannah, Lady Trevelyan. Hannah long kept house for the historian, and so deep was his attachment to her that her marriage, when at last it came, fell upon him like a bereavement. Yet it did not separate them, and on her great brother's death it was still this sister's task to remain his editor, for no one but she could read his difficult
A great American historian, Francis Parkman, was still more dependent than Macaulay on the love of a young sister, Eliza, who, when his eyesight failed him, became for him both eyes and pen.
"She may truly be said," one reads, "to have literally written six of the volumes of his history, inditing each word as it fell from the historian's lips as he sat shading his eyes from the light before his study fire, while she wrote rapidly at the table in the window."
Miss Parkman never married. One wonders if a renounced love may not lie beneath the foundations of her brother's history; but whether or not in her case such sacrifice was made, there is no doubt that many such buried hopes voluntarily foregone by sisters and other sacrificial women do lie at the base of no little human greatness. It somewhat gruesomely reminds one of those dedicatory human victims said to be enclosed in the foundations of medieval bridges and other ancient buildings.
The comparison is, of course, as extreme as it is painful, and is, it is to be hoped of but limited application. Those sacrificial women have perhaps seldom been conscious of their sacrifice, and have been happy, rather, in their sense of collaborating with an inspired friend in a great endeavor. This was surely the case with Caroline Herschel, sister of the great astronomer, from whose biography Professor Mozans in his fascinating book on "Woman in Science" quotes this inspiring passage:
She became his assistant in the workshop; she helped him to grind and polish his mirrors; she stood beside his telescope in the nights of midwinter, to write down his observations when the very ink was frozen in the bottle. She kept him alive by her care; thinking nothing of herself, she lived for him. She loved him and believed in him, and helped him with all her heart and with all her strength. She might have become a distinguished woman on her own account, for with the seven-foot Newtonian sweeper given her by her brother she discovered eight comets, first and last.
A brother-and-sister friendship, in which, again, the element of self-sacrifice did not surely press heavily was that of John and Elizabeth Whittier. Theirs was indeed a love filled with that peace which passeth all understanding.
"It seems almost a profanation to speak of it," said one writer, "so sacred was the love between the two."
Thoreau, again, was blessed with two sisters, Helen and Sophia, on whom their worship of their famous brother sat lightly.
It was a very different genius who wrote this to a sister on the death of her husband:
Oh, my sister, in this hour of overwhelming affliction my thoughts are only for you. I have no wife, I have no betrothed; nor, since I have been better acquainted with my own mind and temper, have I sought them. Live, then, my heart's treasure, for one who has ever loved you with a surpassing love, and who would cheerfully have yielded his own existence to have saved you the bitterness of this letter. Yes, my beloved, be my genius, my solace, my companion, my joy. We will never part, and if I cannot be to you all our lost friend was, at least we will feel that life can never be a blank while gilded by the perfect love of a sister and a brother.
The reader will scarcely have suspected the writer of this impassioned tenderness to be that Machiavellian statesman, Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli was no less fortunate in his wife than in his sister. Just before their marriage he had written to her:
I shall always have the refuge of your sweet heart in sorrow or disappointment, and your quick and accurate sense to guide me in prosperity and triumph.
And the prophecy was fulfilled, as few such prenuptial prophecies are, though in many respects it was a marriage of opposites, as Mrs. Disraeli made fun out of emphasizing in a quaint document to be found in her husband's biography. In parallel columns she placed their opposing qualities after this fashion — Disraeli's in the first column, hers in the second:
- Very calm. Very effervescent
- Manners grave and almost sad. Gay and happy-looking when speaking.
- Never irritable. Very irritable.
- Bad-humored. Good-humored.
- Very patient. No patience.
- Very studious. Very idle.
- Very generous. Only generous to those she loves.
- No vanity. Much vanity.
- Conceited. No conceit.
- He is seldom amused. Everything amuses her.
- He is a genius. She is a dunce.
- He is to be depended on to a certain degree. She is not to be depended on.
- His whole soul is devoted to politics and ambition. She has no ambition and hates politics.
Disraeli's great rival, Gladstone, was even more fortunate in a wife who was his wonderful helpmeet through his life. After sixty years of married happiness the old man wrote:
It would not be possible to unfold in words the value of the gifts which the bounty of Providence has conferred upon me through her.
She had great skill as doctor and nurse, and was the ever-watchful guardian of her husband's health through the long strain of his strenuous parliamentary career. She was also his wise and outspoken critic, as one may judge by this note in Lord Morley's journal of a holiday he spent with the Gladstones, in 1892, Gladstone being, then eighty-two:
After breakfast Mrs. Gladstone came to my room and said how glad she was that I had not scrupled to put unpleasant points; that Mr. Gladstone must not be shielded and sheltered as some great people are, who hear all the pleasant things and none of the unpleasant; that the perturbation from what is disagreeable only lasts an hour.
Mrs. Gladstone, born Catherine Glynne, lived to see her great man safely at rest from his labors, and herself followed him two years later.
Men of science seem to have been particularly fortunate in their wives. Huxley's wife, according to his son, was his "help and stay for forty years; the critic whose judgment he valued almost above any, and whose praise be cared most to win." He "invariably submitted his writings to the criticism of his wife before they were seen by any other eye. To her judgment was due the toning down of many a passage which erred by excess of vigor, and the clearing up of phrases which would be obscure to the public. In fact, if any essay met with her approval, he felt sure it would not fail of its effect when published."
The astronomer Kepler would have counted his wife as his greatest discovery, and the debt of Pasteur to his wife and daughter is dwelt on by all his biographers.
"It is impossible," says one of them, rightly to appreciate Pasteur's life without some understanding of the immense assistance which he received in his home. Whether in discussing forms of crystals, watching over experiments, shielding her husband from all the daily fret of life, or busy at the customary evening task of writing to his dictation, Mme. Pasteur was at once his most devoted assistant and incomparable companion." Another writer gives a very human picture of the great scientist running up from his laboratory, after making one of his discoveries, to announce it to his wife and daughter, embracing them as he did so, with the tears running down his cheeks.
Agassiz and his wife were such close fellow workers that in the preface to "A journey in Brazil" we find them saying:
Our separate contributions have become so closely interwoven that we should hardly know how to disconnect them.
Another great traveler, Livingstone, had an intrepid wife by his side in all his explorations till that last one in which he had to dig her grave in the valley of the Zambezi, and go on alone through "Darkest Africa" indeed.
Literary men, for the most part, do not seem to have been fortunate in their wives — though their wives might perhaps prefer the matter stated to the effect that they have seldom been fortunate in their husbands. So, perhaps, Mrs. Carlyle might have put it, though one cannot but feel that honors were even in that tragic misalliance. It was to a mother and sister that the sad, difficult soul of the author of "Sartor Resartus" turned for sympathy and understanding not in vain.
Browning, as we know, was one of the happy exceptions. In that perfect union, where each inspired and was inspired by the other, it would be hard to say which gave most. To be at once muse, wife, and poet has perhaps never again happened to woman — each the other's poet and each eager to acclaim the other as the greater.
"She has genius; I am only a painstaking fellow," said Browning once. "Can't you imagine a clever sort of angel who plots and plans and tries to build up something — he wants to make you see it as he sees it — shows you one point of view, carries you off to another, hammering into your head the thing he wants you to understand; and while this bother is going on, God Almighty turns you off a little star — that's the difference between us. The true creative power is hers, not mine."
Browning's other inspirer, Shelley, tragic as was his first love, found in his second wife, Mary Godwin, one of the heroic women of the world. Poe's ill-starred life knew one happiness, that of his beautiful, adored
"Now, you can write your book!"
Of Emerson's life with "Lidian" — his pet name for his second wife, Lydia — it has been said that it was as if "two angels had set up housekeeping together." In the delicate art of living with a transcendental philosopher, Mrs. Emerson was more than matched by Mrs. Bronson Alcott, wife of probably the most helpless idealist ever brought face to face with this perplexing world. It is laughable as well as pitiful to think what would have become of the gentle founder of "Fruitlands" — Alcott's vegetarian community near Concord — without the common-sense "mothering" of his wife and of that daughter whose literary gift, first displayed in "Little Women," was afterward to support her whole family.
One would like to dwell on Louisa Alcott's part of the story. Of course, the father was such an absent-minded angel that it was impossible to be angry with him. A story is told of his returning from a lecturing trip, having, to the dismay of his family, lost his overcoat and with it all the eagerly anticipated proceeds, except one dollar.
"I call that doing very well," said the kind wife. "Since you are safely home, dear, we don't ask anything more!"
And this characteristic passage in one of the daughter's letters to her sister speaks volumes:
I feel very moral to-day, having done a big wash alone, baked, swept the house, picked the hops, got dinner, and written a chapter in "Moods."
What musicians owe to women would fill many volumes — and how women have fared at the hands of musicians would make a prodigious supplement. Behind all the music of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Wagner, Liszt, Gounod, Grieg, as some master lays his bow upon the violin, or his fingers on the piano, or the sea of sound surges and floats up from the orchestra like a storm gathering in a forest, with low plaining as of breaking hearts, or sudden sweeping volume of passionate melody, there seem to rise at times, like wraiths borne on the wind, the starry souls of women, who loved and gave and suffered —
She was only a woman, famished for loving,Mad with devotion, and such slight things;
But he was a very great musician,
Grimacing and fingering his fiddle-strings.
In that cloud of witnessing women are not merely the women who inspired the tumultuous passions that create a "Tristan und Isolde" or a Chopin "Fantaisie," but sometimes it is a devoted sister like Fanny Mendelssohn, or a tender mother like the mother of Richard Wagner, to whom we find the great sound-compeller writing indeed, as he himself says, like a lover to a sweetheart:
Now I have left you, the feeling of thanks for that grand love of yours toward your child, which you displayed to him so warmly and so tenderly again the other day, so overpowers me that I fain would write, nay, tell you of it in accents soft as of a lover to his sweetheart. Yes, and still softer — for is not a mother's love far greater, far more untainted, than all other?
Behind the monuments of masculine genius, whatever their nature, there is always to be seen, hovering like a spiritual presence, the soul of some woman. Behind the marbles of Michelangelo rises the stately form of the noble and pious Vittoria Colonna. Through her Michelangelo became poet as well as sculptor, as his lofty sonnets to her bear witness.
"Without wings," he wrote to her, "I fly with your wings; by your genius I am raised to the skies; in your soul my thought is born."
Behind the dialogues of Plato it is not only Socrates we see, but Aspasia too, and those other learned women of Athens who were his most ardent disciples. Of Dante it is scarcely necessary to speak, for the pure girl-star that was Beatrice has become the symbol for all time of the uplifting and transmuting influence of woman — of the mere thought and dream of a loved woman. For in Dante's case it was no more than a dream that inspired and sustained him through all his bitter pilgrimage.
There is no need, either, to speak of Petrarch and his Laura, to whom he attributed all his inspiration:
Thus if in me is nursedAny good fruit, from you the seed came first;
To you, if such appear, the praise is due;
Barren myself till fertilized by you.
And there is not a poet from Petrarch to the latest hatched of present-day nightingales that has not, or could not, say the same thing. Nor is there a successful business man, lawyer, statesman, man of affairs, who would not say it, too. When there is a George Washington there is always a Martha Washington, and every James Madison has his "Dolly." Always behind the achievement, whatever its nature, there are the love and the enthusiasm of some unselfish woman, making the purpose and ambition of "her man" her only object in life, dreaming planning, cheering, praising, ever on the watch to keep him up to his best endeavor, the jealous guardian of his strength and peace, his muse, his mother, his wife, his sister, his nurse, his incredibly good friend.
How infinitely tender, almost unearthly, is this quality in women! I find it nowhere more sensitively expressed in words than in some letters to Edwin Booth by the wonderful young wife, Mary Devlin, who was to be his for so short a time — for she died at twenty-three. Booth was despondent and hesitating about his career, and this is how she writes to "the being God has given me to influence and cherish":
We must ever dwell above the thunder, treading beneath our feet the black clouds of dissension. You are too great ever to descend to discord. I have too high an appreciation of the divine spark God has gifted you with, and which you entrust to my care, ever to cause you to seek another sphere than your natural one.
And, again:
If my love is selfish, you will never be great. Part of you belongs to the world. I must remember this, and assist in its blossoming, if I would taste of the ripe fruit. That will prove a rich reward.
How touching is this divine proprietorship of women — "the being God has given me to influence and cherish."
It is not so with men. No, not even with the best of them!
| "The Woman Behind the Man" | |