all good, all life, all joy.
She holds a medical degree and is passionately opposed to the
emancipation of womanhood. She is unmarried, and dresses with
old-fashioned emphasis of the eternal feminine. With a soft and languid
smile she deprecates the fate which sent her to the medical school
instead of the nursery. "Why," she tells me, with radiant eyes,
"everything is sex; poetry, painting, sculpture, religion are sex. Women
who suppress their sexual nature by pursuing the chimerical advantages
of votes and professions are guilty of race-suicide. Race-suicide must
be stopped." There is the believer in the immediate return of Jesus
Christ and the approaching end of the world. He comes as a convert with
a message, and laden with books of prophecy. A year ago he was still a
successful man of business, and a gay soul with no inclination towards
the holy life. The merry twinkle in his eye has disappeared, and in its
place I see the dull glow of an obsessing idea. "What is the good of all
your struggle and your agitation?" he says; "everything will come right
and the wicked will be punished. Join me in proclaiming the coming of
the Lord. Let people be warned and repent in time." There is the lively,
mercurial lady in green who deals in statesmanship and high politics,
who knows everybody of importance, and who controls the fate of nations
through her magic influence behind the scenes. To-day she has been to
the War Office, yesterday the Home Office trembled at her approach,
to-morrow certain officials in high diplomatic circles will know to
their cost what she thinks of them. There is the pompous lady of a
hundred committees. She has a passion for committees, and no sooner has
she formed one or sat on one than she discovers the general unworthiness
of the assembly. She comes to expose people, to prove how utterly
incapable they are of managing affairs.

The priestess of some system of New Thought arrives. She is pleasant and
unruffled. "Can you deny," she asks, "that nothing exists for you but
that which you allow to enter your mind?" No, I cannot. "Very well,
then, you can control the universe by thought. You can gain happiness,
health, peace of mind, and long life. By thought and meditation you can
make for yourself a world of harmony, a consciousness which excludes
everything that is ugly and painful and jarring." I murmur that this is
no doubt possible, but it seems a trifle selfish whilst so many human
souls are struggl