"You are as inquisitive as a man," said Keidansky.

"You mean—" I tried to correct him.

"I mean as inquisitive as a man," he repeated.

This was at a social gathering, a Purim festival given by the B'nai Zion Educational Society at Zion Hall. We sat in the little back room adjoining the main hall, which formed the library of the society. There was a good fire in the stove; we were just far enough away from the music and the dance to enjoy it, and also to relish our chat.

I suppose I had gone beyond the point of discretion in my quest of information; that I asked some questions of a rather personal nature which my friend thought best to leave unanswered, and hence the rebuke I received.

"Some one," said Keidansky, "ought to write an essay on 'The Feminine Traits of Men,' and point out in what a pronounced form men possess the traits, objectionable and acceptable, they constantly attribute to women. For centuries women have borne the blame and ridicule and criticism for qualities they either have in the mildest, most insignificant forms, or do not possess at all—when you compare them to men. And it's about time they should be vindicated, and the truth should make them free from this popular misconception. It seems to me that in a certain way men have actually monopolized most of the objectionable traits of women; and to have shifted all the blame on them for all these years was a crying shame—an outrageous wrong.

"Yes, some one ought to write about it; some one who is young, handsome and gallant—so that he may receive the gratitude of the fair sex. For instance, woman is said to be inquisitive. But who, really, is so anxious to know, so peevish, petulant and prurient as man is? Who like him will go to so much trouble to find out the minutest detail about men, women and things that surround him? Who is so eager and diligent in his search of information, knowledge and light? Who like unto him—I mean, his majesty, man—takes such loving interest in his neighbors and pries so pitilessly into their private affairs? Who makes such an excellent reporter, detective, biographer? Who are the successful editors of our newspapers? Men, of course. They are the ones who constantly load you with questions, who are ever endeavoring to peer into your inmost self and who always want to know about your past, present, future, former and later incarnations. I am told, on good authority, that genealogy—which I understand to be the science of proving that your great-grandfather was somebody and that somebody was your great-grandmother—that this science has been nurtured and garnered and brought up to its present state of perfection, or imperfection, by men.

"It's appalling, this curiosity of man," he continued fervently. "He can go sixteen miles out of his way to pick up the smallest scrap of a fact, or fancy. He can collect endless stores of useless information. He fancies nothing so much as facts. His thirst for knowledge cannot be satiated even by flattery. Men not only make encyclopÆdias, but they actually use them. They not only build and endow libraries, but they actually utilize them—spoil their eyes over musty, misty, mazy volumes. And then, how anxious we all are to be posted on the most unimportant things concerning our friends and the people we meet and know; we are ever attempting to read their minds and their hearts, and if there are none, we put meanings into them. Have not the greatest novelists been men?

"Motke Chabad, the Jewish jester, once came to a strange town near his native city of Wilna, and as he entered the community a patriarchal old Israelite accosted him with the usual Shalom aleichem. Ma simecho? 'Peace be with thee, stranger. What is thy name?'

"'It's none of your business,' answered Motke.

"When asked why he thus rudely acted toward the old man, Motke Chabad explained that had he told the stranger his name the other would have asked where he came from, what his business was, how many children he had, if he was married, how old his father was, if he was still living, if he had any relatives in America, if he ever was blessed by the great rabbi of Wilna, etc., etc., and, said Chabad, 'to say nothing of my morning prayers, I had not as yet had my breakfast, when I met him.'

"Chabad, you see, knew his brother, man. Men curious to know? Rose Dartle is nothing beside Andrew Lang, and he has this advantage over her—that he exists and can find things out. Another instance. You go into your store or factory in the morning. You have a slight toothache. You feel and look rather seedy, and the man who works next to you comes over and sympathetically asks you why it was that she rejected you, why the other fellow won her heart, by what magic charms your rival eclipsed you, etc., and he keeps on with his queries until you tell him—

"Go stand up on the first corner. Take off your hat and cry out: 'Gentlemen, this is a hat, this is a hat! Look into it!' And in a few seconds you will have a big throng of curious men standing about and staring at you. Women who will happen along will pass right on, but men will stand there and stare—like men.

"There was a time when certain things were considered beyond the scrutiny of curious men, when they were held too sacred for investigations and explanations, when the things that were not understood were deemed holy and when men stood in reverence before these things and bowed and took off their thinking caps. But now they want to know everything—even the things that are of prime importance. And there is no use in telling them that nothing really exists—not even the logic of Christian Scientists. They want to know. They must find the facts or make them. What's the use of living if one doesn't know just on what date King Pharaoh died? No news may be good news, but you can't run a newspaper on that principle now-a-days. Whether the things happen or not man wants to know the facts and the details of the cases. They must know. Knowledge is power. To know is to be able to boast of it. And men ever boast of what they know or think they know.

"But why say more? The collected knowledge, the accumulated data and science of the world sufficiently prove the inquisitiveness of men. It is one faculty which works many ways, you know, and these ways are shaped by circumstances and conditions. Now a man peeps through a keyhole to get some material for a bit of gossip, and then he looks up to the stars to make an astronomical observation. But the Darwins and the Newtons and the Herschels prove how curious to know men really are.

"And it is their extreme vanity, too, that makes men so presumptuous, ostentatious and obstreperous. They have so much faith in themselves that no self-respecting person can trust them. They are so confident in their right to know, so convinced of the value of their knowledge, so sure of the absolute necessity of their volubility. They are so unbearably overbearing, self-conscious and self-centred that they forget there are others besides them in this world. It is their vanity that makes men speak in volumes.

"Then they say that women gossip, but you know that they are far outdone, almost totally eclipsed in this respect, too, by men. Men are the real, rapid-transit champion gossips and talkers of the world. It was a dark and dismal night, as the story goes, and we all sat around the fire and the captain said, 'Jack, tell us a story,' and Jack told a number of stories, and so did others, and we all told of divers devilish, wicked things our friends had done, and in our heart of hearts were awfully sorry we did not do these things ourselves, and we made mud-cakes out of good, well-preserved reputations. Oh, how well we can and how we do talk about our neighbors; but you know, people do like to talk about those whom they love. Marie Corelli recently said—now do not scowl because I quote Marie Corelli. She is a very good woman; only she could not resist the temptation to write a few novels, and they may not be so bad, only I could never get myself to read them because I heard that Queen Victoria liked them immensely. Hold on, though; I guess I did read one of these novels in a Yiddish translation; but that was because the translator did not say whose work it was. I think he thought it was original with himself. In fact, he passed it off as his own—which was a brave thing to do, though the book proved to be popular. But I lost my train of thought. Marie Corelli recently said that she never endured such a babel of gossiping tongues as she once heard when being entertained to luncheon at a men's club, and she added, 'nor have I known many more reputations picked to pieces than on that occasion.' But a recent writer told us what awful gossips all the historians have been, and they were all men. We were told that Herodotus, who is the father of history, was also one of the most inveterate of gossips. Saint Simon was considered essentially a gossip, and even therefore a wonderful historian of the time of Louis XV. Pepys, this writer told us, was the greatest gossip that ever lived, also the greatest historian of his time. Even Mommsen, we were told, shows some of the traits of a gossip in his monumental history of Rome. The same was said of Gibbon and many others. Gossip is not only the raw material of history, we were informed, but it is also the raw material of the realistic novel, and as I said before, the finest novels have been produced by the sons of Adam.

"Women are also charged with being loquacious, but that is another trumped-up, false charge. You well know that the loquaciousness of men is prodigious, tremendous. Man is the most wonderful talking machine ever invented, and one of his favorite topics is the talkativeness of woman. Men talk you to mental derangement and death wherever you go. There is no escape. Nearly every man you meet is ready to tell you the sad story of his life—sad, because he is ready to tell it. Many of them write their autobiographies, and what with these and their sermons and orations, novels and essays, histories and philosophies—there will soon be no more room for libraries. And the worst thing about man's garrulity is that he taxes the intellect so heavily, that what he says is loaded with so much meaning. Anything a man says, you know, is in danger of becoming literature. It's appalling. He always makes you think, whereas what little a woman does say is so light and airy, breezy and restive. A woman, too, writes a book, occasionally, but she does not mean anything by it.

"But men are so very bad in this respect, so terribly blatant. They never cease talking. When they don't talk they write, and the pen is worse than the sword. Why am I afraid to ask the man, who stands near me waiting for a car, what time it is? Because he might tell me of his grandfather's heroic exploits in the Civil War. To have gone to war was cruel; but to have left some one behind to boast of it was criminal. Why am I afraid to read the latest short story that I have written to my friend? Because he might show me a poem just done. And I nearly forgot to point out what a monumental proof of naÏve garrulity the Talmud is. The Talmud, that strange conglomeration of law, love, legend, gossip, fable, and occasionally a bit of wisdom, which one can find if one searches diligently.

"They say also that women are capricious and changeful; but the progress of the world shows how easily men change their minds. Yes, someone ought to write an essay and point these things out, and vindicate a much-maligned sex. It's a good chance for a man for some interesting gossip on the subject."

"I suppose, then, that you believe in woman's rights," I at length haphazarded an interruption.

"Yes," answered Keidansky, "I believe that women should have all their rights, and should not, as the French cynic would have it, be killed at forty. It's too late. I mean," he added quickly, "that it's too late to talk any more about it."