your purse had been snatched from you by force would be to make yourself a mark of scorn and for hissing, to bring upon yourself an obloquy far greater than that accorded to the active partner in the transaction, whose doings would be greeted with a shrug of the shoulders and the explanation that pickpockets are pickpockets, and will never be anything but what nature has made them; and, after all, you must have dangled the purse temptingly before his eyes. Under these circumstances, with the thief at liberty to ply his trade, the fact that you had money in your pocket would be, strictly speaking, an accident; and, to make the parallel complete, the lack of your money—the fact that it had been taken from you even against your will—would have to be accounted a black disgrace, leaving a lasting smear upon your whole life. That, it seems to me, is the exact position with regard to what is commonly termed a woman's "honour." I should prefer to put it that a woman has no honour; only an accident.
In such a world as I have described—a world run in the interest of the light-fingered class—the average and decent man would find it just as
