roach the business with far greater
fastidiousness than their grandmothers or even their mothers exhibited.
They are harder to please, and hence pleased less often. The woman of a
century ago could imagine nothing more favourable to her than marriage;
even marriage with a fifth rate man was better than no marriage at all.
This notion is gradually feeling the opposition of a contrary notion.
Women in general may still prefer marriage, to work, but there is an
increasing minority which begins to realize that work may offer the
greater contentment, particularly if it be mellowed by a certain amount
of philandering.

There already appears in the world, indeed, a class of women, who, while
still not genuinely averse to marriage, are yet free from any theory
that it is necessary, or even invariably desirable. Among these women
are a goodman somewhat vociferous propagandists, almost male in their
violent earnestness; they range from the man eating suffragettes to such
preachers of free motherhood as Ellen Key and such professional shockers
of the bourgeoisie as the American prophetess of birth-control, Margaret
Sanger. But among them are many more who wake the world with no such
noisy eloquence, but content themselves with carrying out their ideas in
a quiet and respectable manner. The number of such women is much larger
than is generally imagined, and that number tends to increase steadily.
They are women who, with their economic independence assured, either
by inheritance or by their own efforts, chiefly in the arts and
professions, do exactly as they please, and make no pother about it.
Naturally enough, their superiority to convention and the common frenzy
makes them extremely attractive to the better sort of men, and so it
is not uncommon for one of them to find herself voluntarily sought
in marriage, without any preliminary scheming by herself--surely an
experience that very few ordinary women ever enjoy, save perhaps in
dreams or delirium.

The old order changeth and giveth place to the new. Among the women's
clubs and in the women's colleges, I have no doubt, there is still much
debate of the old and silly question: Are platonic relations possible
between the sexes? In other words, is friendship possible without
sex? Many a woman of the new order dismisses the problem with another
question: Why without sex? With the decay of the ancient concept of
women as property there must come inevitably a reconsideration of