The modern woman has learned that it is a club that raises cain.  Yet, I think, I recognize faces here to-night that I see behind the windows of Fifth Avenue clubs of an afternoon, with their noses pressed flat against the broad plate glass, and as woman trips along the sidewalk, I have observed that these gentlemen appear to be more assiduously engaged than ever was a government scientific commission, in taking observations upon the transit of Venus.

Before those windows passes many a face fairer than that of the Ludovician Juno or the Venus of Medici.  There is the Saxon blonde with the deep blue eye, whose glances return love for love, whose silken tresses rest upon her shoulders like a wealth of golden fleece, each thread of which looks like a ray of the morning sunbeam.  There is the Latin brunette with the deep, black, piercing eye, whose jetty lashes rest like a silken fringe upon the pearly texture of her dainty cheek, looking like raven’s wings spread out upon new-fallen snow.

And yet the club man is not happy.  As the ages roll on woman has materially elevated herself in the scale of being.  Now she stops at nothing.  She soars.  She demands the co-education of sexes.  She thinks nothing of delving into the most abstruse problems of the higher branches of analytical science.  She can cipher out the exact hour of the night when her husband ought to be home, either according to the old or the recently adopted method of calculating time.  I never knew of but one married man who gained any decided domestic advantage by this change in our time.  He was a habitue of a club situated next door to his house.  His wife was always upbraiding him for coming home too late at night.  Fortunately, when they made this change of time, they placed one of those meridians from which our time is calculated right between the club and his house.  Every time he stept across that imaginary line it set him back a whole hour in time.  He found that he could then leave his club at one o’clock and get home to his wife at twelve; and for the first time in twenty years peace reigned around the hearthstone.

Woman now revels even in the more complicated problems of mathematical astronomy.  Give a woman ten minutes and she will describe a heliocentric parallax of the heavens.  Give her twenty minutes and she will find astronomically the longitude of a place by means of lunar culminations.  Give that same woman an hour and a half with the present fashions, and she can not find the pocket in her dress.

And yet man’s admiration for woman never flags.  He will give her half his fortune; he will give her his whole heart; he seems always willing to give her everything that he possesses, except his seat in a horse-car.