He gets
right back to the heart of primal things. When he wrote that
line he was not really thinking that there was a nasty poison in
the heart of a woman or death in her hands. What he was thinking
was that in the jungle the female lion or tiger or jaguar must go
and find a particularly secluded cave and bear her young and
raise them to be quite active kittens before she leads them out,
because there is danger of the bloodthirsty father eating them
when they are tiny and helpless. And if perchance a male finds
the cave of his mate and her tiny young and enters it to do
mischief, then there is no recorded instance I know of in which
the female, fighting in defense of her young, has not been 'more
deadly than the male.' And that is the origin of the
much-discussed line concerning the female of the species, and it
holds good fairly well down the line of the wild. It's even true
among such tiny things as guinea pigs and canary birds. There is
a mother element in the heart of every girl. Daddy used to say
that half the women in the world married the men they did because
they wanted to mother them. You can't tell what is in a woman's
heart by looking at her. You must bring her face to face with an
emergency before you can say what she'll do, but I would be
perfectly willing to stake my life on this: There is scarcely a
girl you know who would see you getting the worst of a fight, say
with Oka Sayye, or someone who meant to kill you or injure you,
who would not pick up the first weapon she could lay her hands
on, whether it was an axe or a stick or a stone, and go to your
defense, and if she had nothing else to fight with, I have heard
of women who put up rather a tidy battle with their claws.
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