ot like to hear distressing things. Said a very
gentle lady not long ago: "Now, please do not tell me about how these
ready-to-wear garments are made, because I do not wish to know. The
last time I heard a woman talk about the temptation of factory girls,
my head ached all evening and I could not sleep." (When the Gentle
Lady has a headache it is no small affair--everyone knows it!) Then
the Gentle Lady will tell you how ungrateful her washwoman was when she
gave her a perfectly good, but, of course, a little bit soiled party
dress, or a pair of skates for her lame boy, or some such suitable gift
at Christmas. She did not act a bit nicely about it!

The Gentle Lady has a very personal and local point of view. She
looks, at the whole world as related to herself--it all revolves around
her, and therefore what she says, or what "husband" says, is final.
She is particularly bitter against the militant suffragette, and
excitedly declares they should all be deported.

"I cannot understand them!" she cries.

Therein the Gentle Lady speaks truly. She cannot understand them, for
she has nothing to understand them with. It takes nobility of heart to
understand nobility of heart. It takes an unselfishness of purpose to
understand unselfishness of purpose.

"What do they want?" cries the Gentle Lady. "Why some of them are rich
women--some of them are titled women. Why don't they mind their own
business and attend to their own children?"

"But maybe they have no children, or maybe their children, like Mrs.
Pankhurst's, are grown up!"

The Gentle Lady will not hear you--will not debate it--she turns to the
personal aspect again.

"Well, I am sure _I_ have enough to do with my own affairs, and I
really have no patience with that sort of thing!"

That settles it!

She does not see, of course, that the new movement among women is a
spiritual movement--that women, whose work has been taken away from
them, are now beating at new doors, crying to be let in that they may
take part in new labors, and thus save womanhood from the enervation
which is threatening it. Women were intended to guide and sustain
life, to care for the race; not feed on it.

Wherever women have become parasites on the race, it has heralded the
decay of that race. History has proven this over and over again. In
ancient Greece, in the days of its strength and glory, the women bore
their full share of the labor, both manual and mental; not only