matter of prejudice. On the
other hand, who wrote Junius's Letters ought not to be a principle or
a prejudice, it ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferent
inquiry. But take an energetic modern girl secretary to a league to show
that George III wrote Junius, and in three months she will believe it,
too, out of mere loyalty to her employers. Modern women defend their
office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk
and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish
wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they
do office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it.

*****

IV. THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT

The larger part of womankind, however, have had to fight for things
slightly more intoxicating to the eye than the desk or the typewriter;
and it cannot be denied that in defending these, women have developed
the quality called prejudice to a powerful and even menacing degree. But
these prejudices will always be found to fortify the main position of
the woman, that she is to remain a general overseer, an autocrat within
small compass but on all sides. On the one or two points on which she
really misunderstands the man's position, it is almost entirely in order
to preserve her own. The two points on which woman, actually and of
herself, is most tenacious may be roughly summarized as the ideal of
thrift and the ideal of dignity.

Unfortunately for this book it is written by a male, and these two
qualities, if not hateful to a man, are at least hateful in a man. But
if we are to settle the sex question at all fairly, all males must make
an imaginative attempt to enter into the attitude of all good women
toward these two things. The difficulty exists especially, perhaps, in
the thing called thrift; we men have so much encouraged each other in
throwing money right and left, that there has come at last to be a sort
of chivalrous and poetical air about losing sixpence. But on a broader
and more candid consideration the case scarcely stands so.

Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than
extravagance. Heaven knows I for one speak disinterestedly in the
matter; for I cannot clearly remember saving a half-penny ever since I
was born. But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the
more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic
because it is waste. It is prosaic to throw money away, beca