and even when he achieves it, it is not becoming to him.

For woman's adaptability is not the domination of a weaker nature by a stronger, it is in itself a noble and world-necessary form of strength.

Strength is needed as well for the taking as the making of an impression,--something more than mere ductility. Weakness may never bear the stamp of power,--it breaks in the moulding; and it is rather because woman is so strong that she is able to take the Caesarean stamp of any form of power. Nor cares she by whose hands she is moulded, whose image she wears, be it warrior, poet, or priest, so long as she feels the veritable grasp and impress of power. Some women are already made in the image of the man they are to love before they meet him. Very wonderful, very terrible, then, is the meeting, and it is a meeting that usually comes too late. But oftener God gives a man a little measure of porcelain and a handful of stars, and leaves him to make the woman he needs for himself; and very wonderful too is that making,--though the man will always have been the father before he was the lover.

Why, one may ponder, should a man who is great enough to mould a woman to help him be great, not be great enough to do without her at all? Let lovers of the unfathomable ask at the same time: Why is man, man? and woman, woman? and what are both?

This gentle doll with the sweet breath, which he nips up in his arms and kisses, and gives a tongue that she may talk back to him his own words, endows with brains that she may think his thoughts,--a quaint little helpless lovely parody of his wisdom and power; a toy, yes; a refreshment, yes; a place of peace, yes,--but how much more! Yes, more by all that we don't understand when we say "woman."

Why a great man should need, not a great woman, but a little woman, a very little woman,--how is it to be explained, unless it be that woman, however little, is mysteriously great, just because she is a woman, a little woman? Unknown properties were wrapped up somewhere in that porcelain; to press it with the lips is to feel strange virtue coming into one,--the devil was in those stars.

Great men are only nourished on the elements. Woman is an element, all the elements in one,--earth, air, fire, and water, met together in a rose. She is a spring among the rocks, and she comes up dimpling from the roots of the world. She is just as simple and just as strange. O! little shining spring of woman that is called Jenny, a great man must draw up through you the unfathomed, deep strengths of the old world. He bends above you and drinks, and as he drinks, his face is mirrored in yours.

"Jenny, I don't think I'd read 'Miss ----,' if I were you," would say the great man.

"No, dear?" So Jenny was presently reading Ruskin instead, and wondering how she could ever have read "Miss ----." And deep in her dear heart she was saying, "Of course not; great men's wives never read 'Miss ----.'"

And yet had the great man said, "Read Gaboriau instead,"--as a certain very great man does,--Jenny's heart would have said, "Of course, great men's wives always read Gaboriau."

No! great men's wives read "Sesame and Lilies," and "Sartor Resartus," and "Marius the Epicurean," and "Richard Feverel," and "Virginibus Puerisque,"--they even try to read Newman's "Apologia." Such were the books on the sunnier side of Theophilus Londonderry's little library in No. 3 Zion Place. In dark corners behind easy-chairs were the deep-sea pools of theology,--pools which had long since given up all the fish they had in them for their owner,--slabs of antique divinity, such as you would find likewise in the equally cherished library of Londonderry Senior.

Such were the fathers that slumbered on in a well-earned repose, and which, far from desiring new readers, were so old that they were glad to rest undisturbed,--being far too self-important to confuse a considerate regard for their repose with neglect. And many of them were really quite valuable as decoration, because of their fine old coats of gilded leather; and such were ranged in the more penetrable shadows or even in the lamp-light. Theophilus would point to them as to a portrait-gallery of dead ancestors. One might admire the quaint and distinguished cut of their clothes without dreaming of wearing the same,--and indeed old divinity, he used to say, was poor food for young divines.

His divinity indeed was fed on the technical side, it is to be feared, by the more destructive biblical criticism, like most destructive engines, coming all the way from Germany, and at its more vital centres by importations of strong meat from Russia and Scandinavia. Tolstoi and Ibsen were his archprophets.

There was likewise a great Paris moralist called Zola, and a strange old American father called Walt Whitman. And beauty, that can never be far away from strength, found many new and wonderful prophets in that little library,--poets and painters and musicians of whom hardly anyone else in Coalchester had yet heard, and certainly no one above the age of twenty-five.

Surely youth is in nothing more marvellous than in its mysterious power of attracting to itself into the most out-of-the-way places the sustenance and companionship it needs. In the unlikeliest wilderness inspired youth is never without the mysteriously-brought food and the company of angels. Powers of the air will sweep across continents to rescue it from prison, soft gales travel from south to north to sow seeds of beauty in its narrow ways, and little songs will flutter like butterflies for hundreds of miles to cheer its heart.

The Time-Spirit had given its angels charge concerning these young people, and, remote as they were from all the fiery centres of thought and the dreaming schools of art, Zion Place, no less than the Rue de Rivoli, took its thought of the newest and its beauty of the best.

CHAPTER VII

THE LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF COALCHESTER

I have said that Coalchester was a very ignorant old town. I did not mean to imply that there were no M.A.'s there. In fact, there were quite a number. You may be sure that if spiritual and intellectual life had its representatives, as we have seen, spiritual and intellectual death had its representatives, too--by which I don't mean either to imply that the M.A.'s were dead M.A.'s, dead and buried with Latin over them in the old brassed and effigied church, which was so old and large that it was hardly less conceited than a cathedral. Spiritual and intellectual death in Coalchester, as elsewhere, was officially represented by the Literary and Philosophical Society, which still unblushingly went on retaining its adjectives, even in the face of its "Transactions," which seemed mainly composed of treasurer's reports, with an occasional paper on fossils.

Indeed the one spark of life in the pathetic old society was its real interest in the antediluvian and prehistoric. For the life that was dead it had a perfect passion, and it sometimes held conversaziones to gaze at it through microscopes. Occasionally it would waken up to literature with a paper on Akenside. In everything that didn't in the least matter some of these mild old gentlemen were genuinely learned. Not that they hadn't read the great poets, even in the original Greek, Latin, and Italian. Poets in dead and foreign languages were a form of fossils, and English poets--with that divine bloom upon them!--they had a way of fossilising by spectacles, so that they never read them alive. Thus they had never read Shakespeare even in the original.

Once, long ago in Coalchester, a hundred years ago, there had been a little circle of elegant literati, connoisseurs of literature and art,--men, so far as men of that age might be, genuinely, if timidly and old-maidishly, affectionate towards belles-lettres; men who had got so far as to appreciate the freshness of an Elizabethan song; minor Bishops Percy; and