Feminine Faults

WOMAN has a lively imagination; that is an asset. It can, however, soon become a fault; she readily builds up fanciful notions, and because an object is pleasant and flatters her taste, she seizes upon it as something worth having, confounding the attractive with the good, and salves her conscience with this false sense of value.

A critic could say with no little truth, “Every woman has three lives—a life she endures, a life she wants, and a life she dreams about; the first is made up of the things she does despite the fact they do not please her, the second is made up of the things she does because they please her and the third, of the things she doesn’t do either because she can’t or because even while desiring them she does not actually want them.”

The third trait is the most interesting—this dream-life is the one that occupies woman the most. She plots situations to suit her fancy in which through the power of her imagination she is the heroine. The result is that she chafes at the impossibility of actually achieving what her imagination conceives or her sensibilities evoke.

Man, being obliged to plunge himself into things, to lose himself in occupations which if not more engrossing than home-tasks are at least more evident as to their consequences and much less conducive to meanderings of the imagination, is more given to hard-headed realism. He is in danger of living too much in the prosaic and of lacking verve; woman is generally not lacking in verve, but she easily lands in the stars for riding a myth.

Further, man, unless he is born talkative—and then he is truly obnoxious—is much less tempted to loquaciousness than woman. Knowing better than woman how difficult it is to be informed and being unwilling to talk unless he is informed, he is more discreet, less discursive; woman, less impressed by the necessity of being well-informed before speaking, begins by talking; she learns later.

Since woman’s intuitions are much more rapid, she manages to talk on almost any subject without knowing much of anything thoroughly; it is a wonderful help to speak with ease because she is not hampered by the difficulty of being exact.

In addition woman has greater zeal, she is more apostolic, she has proselytizing in her blood. When Our Lord wanted to evangelize Sichem, it was a woman he sent—the Samaritan woman. And the work was well done; she quickly told her friends and acquaintances—all the people of the little village—what she had said to Jesus and what Jesus had said to her, even the admonition He had given her “Thou hast said well, ‘I have no husband,’ for thou hast had five husbands and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband.”

The love to talk is so strong in a woman that she does not hesitate to speak evil of herself to satisfy it.

Some cynic credits these cruel words to a child. Sympathetic friends asked the little one what his father’s last words were. He said, “Papa did not say any last words; Mamma was with him to the end.” It is too clever to be true.

It is a well known and incontestable fact that there are many women who possess exquisite discretion. Indeed, if men were not also inveterate talkers, would they find so much occasion as they do to speak unkindly of women?