Such was actually the end of two exquisite princesses of the house of Lorraine: Margaret of Lorraine, duchess of Alençon, who first connected herself with a hospital, then with the strict order of the Poor Clares; and Philippa of Gueldres, who entered the same sisterhood when her son ascended the throne. She lived with them for twentyseven years in the deepest humility, styling herself "a worm of the soil," though her companions might continue to call her "our reverend Mother the Queen."

The new generation was to see little of these sublime modesties. The majority of widows lived in the world; but what liberty they enjoyed they bought very dear, and on the whole they had less liberty than wives. They were gay and did not darken too often the vestry-door; they did not flaunt the time-honoured widow's cap, still dear to Englishwomen-headgear that would disgust anybody with widowhood. Was that a crime? By no means; and yet the slightest slip or suspicion of a slip was in them unpardonable. Men saw in every widow either a naughty woman or a hypocrite, and they did not shrink from saying 80. A physician was once bargaining for a mule in the presence of a fair widow, and said he: "I want one that's a widow": and as the dealer did not understand him, he added: "Yes, a widow, that is, plump, and light on her heels, and a good feeder." The saying ran: "If a man thinks his wife a little too thin, he had better make her a widow." A widow was regarded only as so much raw material; and from the moment when "Goodman Danger" was no longer at hand, sin itself seemed to lose its sweetness. Widows were recommended to frequent none but deserted chapels, to contemplate the crucifix during the night. This condescending pity sprang sometimes from good-heartedness; but it was often odious to them, and all the more so because everyone, even the most confidential servants, fancied they had a right to throw in their sympathetic suggestions. Anne of France was indignant at this universal treason, which shocked her sense of right.1

And yet society added one more tyranny. For a widow

1 She herself, however, employed on occasion the most convincing arguments. She had confiscated the jewels of her cousin, the Countess of Montpensier, who was regarded as rather too hot-headed for a widow, and she refused to restore them to her.

to marry again was scarcely tolerated. She would have been just as severely chided for finding a second husband as she would have been for not finding a first. She would be sooner forgiven for a frailty, a yielding to temptation, than for contracting a new tie. What woman was this who had not had too much of one husband, and was not amply satisfied? Among the people she was favoured with a sort of skimmington ride. Margaret of France defied the prejudice and married again: it was in sooth the deed of a philosophic woman. But in general, widows were still chained to their widowhood by various considerations; in the first place, the practical difficulty of finding another husband. Men were quite ready to court a widow, but very few would make the sacrifice involved in marrying her. A woman no longer young, a "shelled peascod," who no longer had anything to give and had settled habits of her own, was the antipodes of the little maiden of twelve so much in request. Besides, the widow herself was enjoying a large and tranquil life, thanks to the jointure of which a second marriage would deprive her; sometimes the whole of her husband's fortune had come to her on condition that she devoted herself to the children. She held in all matters the authority which had belonged to the dead man, and indeed it was not uncommon for the husband expressly to bequeath her this authority in his will.3 The drawback to this life of business management is precisely that a woman loses in it something of the bloom of her grace and sweetness, she no longer needs to employ persuasiveness and love since she has force at her disposal, and the result is that she becomes a sort of man, and acquires some of the defects by which she has suffered at the hands of her husband. We can thus understand quite well that a woman who wishes to remain a woman will do her best, for her own security and

1The Fifteen Joys of Marriage include among domestic calamities to return from war after a long captivity and to find one's wife wearing the finery of a new lord and master.

2" There's no man will have you!" is an insult flung by a peasant at a woman during a squabble.

3"Be obedient to your mother, show her honour and reverence, and take care to please her in everything you can, as is her due, as much because it is God's commandment as that I know she merits it, and that you ought so to do if you wish to succeed, for having known her, I know that she will advise you so well that you will be therewith content" (Instructions of a Duke of Nemours to his sons).

charm's sake, to live under the fostering wing of a precious memory, and will cherish with the utmost devotion her (so to speak) posthumous husband. There lies her real strength. The Renaissance woman, then, a woman of essentially fine grain, and well versed in everything it was her business to know, was a woman of absolute sincerity, and we must believe her when she speaks well of marriage. She considered that institution as perfectly reconcilable with the fulfilment of a mission in the world, indeed as favourable, almost indispensable, to it. She had no more reason to give up marriage than to give up eating and drinking: it is not this that enchains the soul. The idealists differed from the utilitarians solely in the belief that one marriage is enough: the former covered their faces if a widow, not ethereal enough to satisfy them, went by on the arm of a new husband; the latter applauded, and fancied that by this transaction the animal nature was held in check. But this is of little interest to us. The only result important to note is that a woman, without ceasing to be a woman, could win freedom for her affections and her activities as well as a man. When she had attained that condition of liberty, she ascribed all the honour to marriage, and blessed it instead of thinking that she owed everything to herself. Marriage, like many human inventions, is a contrivance capable of producing either liberty or tyranny, and women had simply altered its direction.

They wielded intimate and domestic powers. Their rival was not the husband, they came to terms with him; it was the man who looked after their body or their soul, and to whom, out of weakness or indolence, they were led to attach themselves like an anaemic ivy-plant. To mark their place in this world they had themselves to learn how to obtain what brings happiness: health of body and of soul. Respected in regard to the body, it remained for them to gain self-respect in regard to the soul, and to show that true Christianity consists in bestowing power and liberty, not in withdrawing them.

BOOK II. LIFE IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER I

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

MARGARET of France said, very incisively: "The defect of women is timidity." They are born to fear.

Women had become habituated to a passive and secondary part. They desired to escape from it, they felt the need of activity and a freer air, their wings were growing and they adored intellectual liberty, at any rate they said so-and they had in fact already snapped many of their chains; but when you come to close quarters and exchange confidences with them, you perceive that they are still held fast by a multitude of secondary diffidences, by tenuous invisible threads starting often enough from social conventions of little or no importance. They are unable to wing their flight, or they require a man to go first and shew them the way; or an absolute necessity, an enthusiasm, an impulse of devotion is necessary to start them off.

They move at last, not through reasoning, but as the result of the more or less vague sentiment that while their homelife has brought them no love, yet they are made for love and have a love mission to fulfil. A modern aesthetic writer-but a man after all and only moderately sensiblehas thus explained the appeal of grace as it affected himself: "I had nothing to love. For me my parents were in some sort only the visible powers of Nature."1 How much more does this apply to women! They want something to love! Separated from her family the wife finds in her husband the

1 Ruskin.