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Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894

"The Professor at the Breakfast-Table"

The red heart sends all its instincts up to
the white brain to be analyzed, chilled, blanched, and so become pure
reason, which is just exactly what we do not want of woman as woman. The
current should run the other-way. The nice, calm, cold thought, which in
women shapes itself so rapidly that they hardly know it as thought,
should always travel to the lips via the heart. It does so in those
women whom all love and admire. It travels the wrong way in the Model.
That is the reason why the Little Gentleman said "I hate her, I hate
her." That is the reason why the young man John called her the "old
fellah," and banished her to the company of the great Unpresentable. That
is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her to pieces with scalpel
and forceps. That is the reason why the young girl whom she has
befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and respect, rather than
with the devotion and passionate fondness which lie sleeping beneath the
calmness of her amber eyes. I can see her, as she sits between this
estimable and most correct of personages and the misshapen, crotchety,
often violent and explosive little man on the other side of her, leaning
and swaying towards him as she speaks, and looking into his sad eyes as
if she found some fountain in them at which her soul could quiet its
thirst.


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