Points of Friction
may even be that his presence will sour the casks, as the presence of a woman is reputed to sour the casks in the great caves of the Gironde, where wine ripens slowly, acquiring merit in silence and seclusion like a Buddhist saint, and as sensitive as a Buddhist saint to the perilous proximity of the feminine. This ancient and reasonable tradition is but one phase of the ancient and reasonable hostility between intoxicants and the sober sex, which dates perhaps from the time when Roman women were forbidden to taste their husbands' wine, but were fed on sweet syrups, like warm soda-fountain beverages, to the ruin of their health and spirits. Small wonder if they handed down to their great-grand-daughters a legitimate antagonism to pleasures they were not permitted to share, and if their remote descendants still cherish a dim, resentful consciousness of hurt. It was the lurking ghost of a dead tyranny which impelled an
224
