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 seriously answered? Would it be possible for any sane and thoughtful woman who was not an American to consider even the remote possibility of our spinsters becoming a detached class, who shall form "the intellectual and economic élite of the sex, leaving marriage and maternity to the less developed woman"? What has become of the belief, as old as civilization, that marriage and maternity are developing processes, forcing into flower a woman's latent faculties; and that the less-developed woman is inevitably the woman who has escaped this keen and powerful stimulus? "Never," said Edmond de Goncourt, "has a virgin, young or old, produced a work of art." One makes allowance for the Latin point of view. And it is possible that M. de Goncourt never read "Emma."

There is a formidable lack of humour in the somewhat contemptuous attitude of women, whose capabilities have not 182