with that pseudo-civilization which apparently has for its object the destruction of the human race by the production of a race of bodiless women.  If I am to be a pessimist, I will be one out and out, and seek to destroy the race in a high-handed and manly way.  Indoor life, inactivity, lack of oxygen in the lungs, these are things which in time produce a white skin, but do it by sacrificing every other attribute of beauty.

In the second place, my ideal woman is beautiful.  I will confess that I do not know what I mean by this; for what is beauty?  It is both subjective and objective.  It depends on taste and education.  It has something to do with habit and experience.  I know I shall not be able to describe this trait, yet when I look up into her eyes—­eyes, remember, which are mere fictions of my imagination—­when I look into her face, when I see her move so statelily into my presence, I recognize there that portion of her which she has inherited from the Aphrodite of other days; and this I know is beauty.  It is not the beauty of an hallucination, the halo which a heart diseased casts about the head of its idol.  It is the beauty which is seen by a sober second thought, a beauty which does not so much dazzle as it delights; a beauty which does not fade with the passing hour, but stays through the heat and burden of the day and until the day is done.

The beauty which my ideal woman inherited from Aphrodite is not a fading one.  It is not simply a youthful freshness which the first decade of womanhood will wither.  It is a beauty which abides; it is a beauty in which the charm of seventeen becomes a real essence of seventy; it is a beauty which is not produced by any artificial pose of the head or by any possible banging of the hair; it is a beauty which the art of dressing may adorn but can never create; it is a beauty which does not overwhelm the heart like an avalanche, but which eats it slowly but surely away as a trickling stream cuts and grooves the solid granite.

I regard true beauty as the divinest gift which woman has received; and was not Pandora, the first of mythical women, endowed with every gift?  And was not Eve, the first of orthodox women, the type of every feminine perfection?  Only Protogyna, the first of scientific women, was poorly and meanly endowed.  If I were a woman I would value health and wealth; I would think kindly of honor and reputation; I would greatly prize knowledge and truth; but above all I would be beautiful—­possessed of that strange and mighty charm which would lead a crowd of slaves behind my triumphal car and compel a haughty world to bow in humble submission at my feet.