THE LAUDABLE DISHONESTY OF WOMEN.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 61, 23 November 1907, Page 3

THE LAUDABLE DISHONESTY OF WOMEN.

By Lilian Bell. Women sometimes get so angry they stutter when their husbands.or some man with equal brutal frankness declares that there is an element of native dishonesty in even the best women, but 1 do not. I am a fair specimen of the trarden variety of woman which grows wild or tame according to the gardener's planting, and when I look within I find that I really don't know right from wrong when it is a question of someone I love. So there you have it. The difference between men and women is that most women are born mothers. That is to say, that whether they ever have any children of their own or not, they are born with the mother instinct which drives them to love something or somebody maternally, which also includes foraging for and protecting it by word or deed. That is why women's testimony even under oath, sometimes has purple streaks in it which no one seems to understand. It is also why women do things with other people's property which judges and juries say: "I think he must be that hero vou hold divergent opinions upon, and if "set free would do it again under the same circumstances.

For this reason I would strongly define a mother as a woman who could commit what men would call crimes for their children, and under the head ''children" come everything, from husbands to cats, dogs and parrots. On the other hand, a woman who would neither tell a lio to save her child's life, nor steal a bottle of milk to keep her baby from starving, is no mother. She made her first mistake in marrying. She should have remained an old maid and written books. I have my opinion of women who have nothing better to do than to write books.

1 he only permissible time for a married woman to spend writing books is after her husband had been well fed and the children are in bed.

Then, if she doesn't have to darn, let her write.

It is the masculine prerogative to forage and the feminine to protect. Many think that it is the other way about, but women seldom fight unless driven to it and when a woman is driven to fight to protect her loved ones, she fights in a whole-souled, animated manner, which puts a primitive man fight to the blush. It she. is forced to forage, she generally forages simply for her helpless ones and denies herself, while man's foraging prowess is upborne by the fact that, while others are to be fed first, of course, he expects to get some also. ihere are exceptions, certainly, but this makes the general rule. But there is many a woman whose sense of right is such that if driven to steal a loaf of bread to keep her child from starving, not one crumb of it would pass her own lips. To eat it herself would seem to her to be stealing. I'or her child,—it was the only right thing to do. And, what is more, she would do it again if necessary. So, also, in his foraging, man knows with fatal accuracy just where legitimate accumulation ends and stealing begins, while a woman forages on whatever she needs to sustain life with the same breadth of view that a 'government permits itself when it absorbs foreign territory. The feminine sense of right, and wrong blurs at the edges when the urgent need of those dependent on her knocks at the door of her soul and her heart answers in frightened leaps. And this protecting, protective" lapse from masculine virtue is what makes good mothers. j

Understand me—l am not defending bad women. I simply put it to vou. If your baby had smallpox in a deserted house and no one would come near you through fear, would you or would you not slip out through the friendly darkness and take what you needed ?" Yet remember! Most men and women would call that stealing. Yet in lesser cases. I know one woman of such sincere and arrogant virtue that she sometimes made herself quite unpleasant in her absorbing effort to live uprightly and speak honestly. Yet when her son went wrong she told some quite fearful lies in her vain but brave effort to protect him, and never knew she was doing it! For she is the sort of woman who writes letters of protest to authors who write as fantastically as some do*, and calls them to account. "She believed in stern facts—no fiction, no humour, no dressing up of ideas ! Speak the truth ! Dear soul! s+ic never knew it when she was lying her proudest. If anybody had told her, her mortification would have been pitiable. No. All her fine, masculine theories crumbled instantly when the underlying maternal was roused. And to me it'was beautiful and most lovable. I am a little weak on ethics, but 1 make up for it in my respect for love. I would not do for a judge, but I think lam cut out for jury duty. I don't envy the other eleven, however.

Experienced lawyers will generally admit that feminine testimony must always be sifted before being thoroughly believed. If no loved one is in dangei women are more honest—more conscientious, moro exact,jjKJ*e*fearful of even the smallest divergence from the truth than men. But if her daughter were in dan-er of a term of imprisonment, is there a mother in the world who would not steep herself in perjury to prove an alibi?

Honourable men often maintain a dignified silence concerning family disgrace which defies intrusion. But the women of the same family will g-o farther. Even to people who know they are lying and who know that they know it, they will weave a tissue of lies to fling over the prostrate one, with the hope that even its thinness may hide the wretched nakedness of the disgrace. And if they tell the lie often enough, they will end by believing it. I know a woman who agreed with her husband on a certain line of talk, false from start to finish, but in their opinion necessary to cover the excesses of a beloved one. They kept it up with such fervour that after about a year, the wife told her husband the minute details of something which he knew had never happened. And it took him an hour to lead her back, step by setp, to the primal fact that none of the tales they had been telling were true. But she had lied so thoroughly that she had ended by believing things it took her some time to realise had originated in her own mind. The woman whose husband, even with children to hold him in the home, takes suddenly to mysterious absences; the woman whose son is quietly allowed to resign from the bank; the woman whose daughter is sent away for the Winter — no one knows where; the wife whose husband is subject to odd illnesses during which no -doctor attends him—who with a large acquaintance has not one or all of these?

And the poor, gallant, brave, courageous lies these women toll to keep the pitiable secret from prying eyes and gossiping tongues. But the most curious part of the

whole matter is that these women shrink from such small things as allowing the servant to say they arc "not at home" to undcrsirable callers. And as the word "lie"— they would flush to their hair

at the hint that they would tell one. Yet if they knew that disgrace to one of their dear ones was the caller whose knock was at the door v every wit, every instinct, every clcverli'ess, every sense

and nerve, would be on the alert to stifle the whisper before it could be utter-

cd, to allay suspicion before it breathed itself, to arrest the unspoken word, and I smile with easy confidence, at the uplifted eyebrows. It is the mother sense —the mother instinct. In the feathered and furred creatures of the forest, the method is to lie and deceive the hunter by feigning death or pretending to be inanimate—by luring with broken wing or frightening by hiss like a snake, but almost invariably the object is to protect the young or the disabled.

In women it takes the form of a dishonesty, equally harmless, equally laudable, equally marked with a divine courage, and planted in the hearts of all true mothers by the hand of God Himself.