[Dark Saint Alaick]

To be sure there is an underlying cause in extenuation for this temperamental shortcoming which in justice to the ostensibly weaker sex should be set forth here. Even though I am taking on the rôle of Devil's Advocate in the struggle to keep woman from canonizing herself by main force I want to be as fair as I can, always reserving the privilege where things are about even, of giving my own side a shade the better of it. The main tap-root reason why women confide over-much and too much in other women is because leading more circumscribed lives than men commonly lead they are driven back upon themselves and into themselves and their sisters for interests and for conversational material.

Taking them by and large they have less with which to concern themselves than their husbands and their brothers, their fathers and their sons have. Therefore they concern themselves the more with what is available, which, at the same time, oftener than not, means some other woman's private affairs.

A woman, becoming thoroughly imbued with an idea, becomes, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a creature of one idea. Everything else on earth is subordinated to the thing--cabal, reform, propaganda, crusade, movement or what not--in which she is interested. Now the average man may be very sincerely and very enthusiastically devoted to a cause; but it does not necessarily follow that it will obsess him through every waking hour. But the ladies, God bless 'em--and curb 'em--are not built that way. A woman wedded to a cause is divorced from all else. She resents the bare thought that in the press of matters and the clash of worlds, mankind should for one moment turn aside from her pet cause to concern itself with newer issues and wider motives. From a devotee she soon is transformed into a habitee. From being an earnest advocate she advances--or retrogrades--to the status of a plain bore. To be a common nuisance is bad enough; to be a common scold is worse, and presently she turns scold and goes about railing shrilly at a world that criminally persists in thinking of other topics than the one which lies closest to her heart and loosest on her tongue.