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 abyss of silence when we see, even in these emancipated times, how little of what woman really thinks and feels gets over the footlights of the world's big stage.

Let us remember it was only yesterday that women in any number began to write for the public prints. But in taking up the pen, what did this new recruit conceive to be her task? 'To proclaim her own or other women's actual thoughts and feelings? Far from it. Her task, as she naturally and even inevitably conceived it, was to imitate as nearly as possible the method, but above all the point of view, of man.

She wrote her stories as she fashioned her gowns and formed her manners, and for the same reasons; in literature following meekly in the steps of the forgotten Master, the first tribal story-teller, inventor of that chimera, "the man's woman."

There was no insuperable difficulty in the way of her playing "the sedulous ape," as is amply demonstrated by the serried ranks of competent and popular woman-novelists.

She is still held to be in no way so highly flattered as by hearing that men can hardly credit her book to be the work of a woman.

The realisation that she had access to a rich and as. yet unrifled storehouse may have crossed her mind, but there were cogent reasons for concealing her knowledge. With that wariness of ages, which has come to be instinct, she contented herself with