CHAPTER V.
Thursday's letters.
(1) SIR,—Your correspondents, with whose indignation I am in sympathy, have to me most unaccountably overlooked the real gravamen of Mr. Dexter's offence. Unlike them, I have read several of that gentleman's brochures, and can assure you that he once posed as the unbounded license for women in Higher Education, if not in other directions. This volte face (I happen to know) will come as a severe disappointment to many; for we had quite counted him one of us.
"We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,"
Shall have, it seems, to 'record one lost soul more, one more devil's triumph,' etc. I subscribe myself, sir, more in sorrow than in anger.
PERCY FLADD,
President, H.W.E.L.
(Hoxton Women's Emancipation League).
(2) Sir,—Why all this beating about the bush? The matter in dispute between Mr. Dexter and his critics was summed up long ago by Scotia's premier poet (I refer to Robert Burns) in the lines—
"To make a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life,"
And vice versa. Your correspondents are too hasty in condemning Mr. Dexter. He may have expressed himself awkwardly; but, as I understood him, he never asserted that education necessarily unsexed a woman, if kept within limits. 'A man's a man for a' that'; then why not a woman? At least, so says:
"AULD REEKIE."
(3) Sir,—Let Mr. Dexter stick to his guns. He is not the first who has found the New Woman an unmitigated nuisance, and I respect him for saying so in no measured terms. Let women, if they want husbands, cease to write oratorios and other things in which man is, by his very constitution, facile princeps, and let her cultivate that desideratum in which she excels—a cosy home and a bright smile to greet him on the doorstep when he returns from a tiring day in the City. Until that is done I, for one, shall remain:
"UNMARRIED."
P.S.—Could a woman have composed Shakespeare?
(4) Sir,—I had no intention of mixing in this correspondence, and publicity is naturally distasteful to me. Nor do I hold any brief for the Higher Education of Women; but when I see writer after writer—apparently of my own sex—taking refuge in what has been called the 'base shelter of anonymity,' I feel constrained to sign myself:
Yours faithfully,
(Mrs.) RACHEL RAMSBOTHAM.
