The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎635r] (160/239)

THE EXTRAVAGANT ECONOMY OF WOMEN.
The trouble with women is that they do not know how to spend
money. The great majority never have any money, or they are
at the mercy of some grim masculine creature, be he father or
husband, who demands items—now think of an average man
bothering himself about items ! I think it must be a survival of
the time when we inhabited harems, or when we were beautiful
dames to whom our true knights gave undying love but nothing
more substantial, or we rejoiced the souls of the ancient patriarchs
though we did not succeed in extracting any cash.
I don’t for a moment believe that the lovely Hebrew damsel,
Rebecca, had a penny of her own, nor that the peerless Guinevere
had half-a-crown (or whatever the coinage was) to buy her
Launcelot a love token. And though Scheherazade—that peerless,
self-contained, circulating library of a thousand and one volumes-
—could tell enough stories to her Sultan to have made the fortune
of a modern publisher, she could hardly have made less even if
she had had the felicity to write a modern novel. The favourite
of the harem would, I am sure, have found a purse a hollow
mockery.
Now we modern women are the descendants, more or less
remote, of Rebecca, Guinevere, and Scheherazade, and our
greatest resemblance to our fair ancestresses is that most of us
have no money to spend, and those of us who have do not know
how to spend it. Heredity is an excuse for being what might
be called the stingy sex.
I wonder what the world would have been like had the purse
strings of time been held by women? More comfortable,
possibly, but, I fear, much less beautiful. It takes the great,
splendid masculine spendthrifts in high places to glorify the
world with treasures of priceless art. But it was an immortal
maiden queen who inspired the greatest poet of all time, and as
the production of poetry has always been cheap, so poetry was
the splendid and inexpensive contribution to the glory of her
reign made by a not too extravagant queen. It is the men who
keep alive the extravagance, the beauty, and the ideality of life.
But little credit to them who have always been able to put
their hands in their trousers pockets and jingle the pennies.
Now time may mean money for a man, but who ever heard
that time meant money for a woman? No one, for the simple
reason that it does not. Time and trouble are of so little value to
VOL. LXXVIII. N.S. K