Women Who Live in Ruts.

Otago Witness, Issue 2779, 19 June 1907, Page 74

Women Who Live in Ruts.

"The woman who sinks into the domestic rut," says a writer in the North American Philadelphia, "is really the victim of her own sense of duty. She neglects her back hair, wears frayed shoe-laces, and leaves the pages of the' last magazine uncut in her determination to make her house a fit abode for her husband ; then defeats her own end by her lack of companionableness. "There's the woman who gets into an intellectual rut. She has all of Maeterlinck's theories at her fingers' ends ; she really understands the situation at Panama ; she can even do long division with six figures at a pinch. Yet, after all, she is a dead failure. "She never seems to realise that these nuggets of "wisdom would not be less valuable for an attractive setting. She cannot comprehend why Rosa Jones, who went to school with her, and always paid as much attention to her stocks as she did to natural philosophy, should be the recipient of th.c attention of extraordinarily cultivated men, who never seek her own society a second time. By-and-bye she consoles herself, with the conviction that really brainy women are shut off from most companionship because their true worth is misunderstood, and she sinks a little deeper into the rut that really has been her undoing. "There's the woman who has got into the rut of her work. It may be very nice work, very interesting, up to a certain point, to her fellow -beings — but it has its limitations. Perhaps she is an artist. She talks colour schemes and high lights and perspective, with her collar under one ear and the dust on her tea table even more than artistically thick; and should you wax rebellious she is convinced that you have no soul. "Or she may be a musician who can rhapsodise over naught but harmony and counterpoint; or a business woman whose heart is uned to addition alone; or a dressmaker whose world is bounded by tucks, gathers, seams, and gores. It does not make any difference what the work is. You have no right to let it make you narrow — to put you into a rut."