in the desert, knowing only that far ahead somewhere,
lay a Land of Promise. Nevertheless, it was by the slow and sometimes
wavering march of such as these, that the land was reached by the people
at last.

For her, whose insight enables her to see, through the distance, those
large beatitudes towards which the struggles and suffering of the women
of today may tend; who sees beyond the present, though in a future which
she knows she will never enter, an enlarged and strengthened womanhood
bearing forward with it a strengthened and expanded race, it is not so
hard to renounce and labour with unshaken purpose: but for those
who have not that view, and struggle on, animated at most by a vague
consciousness that somewhere ahead lies a large end, towards which their
efforts tend; who labour year after year at some poor little gargoyle of
a Franchise Bill, or the shaping of some rough little foundation-stone
of reform in education, or dress a stone (which perhaps never quite fits
the spot it was intended for, and has to be thrown aside!); or who
carve away all their lives to produce a corbel of some reform in sexual
relations, in the end to find it break under the chisel; who, out of
many failures attain, perhaps, to no success, or but to one, and that
so small and set so much in the shade that no eye will ever see it;
for such as these, it is perhaps not so easy to labour without growing
weary. Nevertheless, it is through the labours of these myriad toilers,
each working in her own minute sphere, with her own small outlook, and
out of endless failures and miscarriages, that at last the enwidened
and beautified relations of woman to life must rise, if they are ever to
come.

When a starfish lies on the ground at the bottom of a sloping rock it
has to climb, it seems to the onlooker as though there were nothing
which could stir the inert mass and no means for taking it to the top.
Yet watch it. Beneath its lower side, hidden from sight, are a million
fine tentacles; impulses of will from the central nerve radiate
throughout the whole body, and each tiny fibre, fine as a hair, slowly
extends itself, and seizes on the minute particle of rough rock nearest
to it; now a small tentacle slips its hold, and then it holds firmly,
and then slowly and slowly the whole inert mass rises to the top.

It is often said of those who lead in this attempt at the readaption
of woman's relation to life, that they are "New Women"; and they are