aid, "is always increasingly absorbed in his legal
duties, of which I understand nothing, and which so do not interest me.
My children are all growing up and at school. I have servants enough to
attend to my house. When he comes home in the evening, if I try to amuse
him by telling him of the things I have been doing during the day, of
the bazaars I am working for, the shopping I have done, the visits I
have paid, he is bored. He is anxious to get away to his study, his
books, and his men friends, and I am left utterly alone. If it were not
for the society of women and other men with whom I have more in common,
I could not bear my life. When we first met as boy and girl, and fell
in love, we danced and rode together and seemed to have everything in
common; now we have nothing. I respect him and I believe he respects me,
but that is all!" It is, perhaps, only in close confidences between
man and man and woman and woman that this open sore, rising from the
divergence in training, habits of life, and occupation between men
and women is spoken of; but it lies as a tragic element at the core of
millions of modern conjugal relations, beneath the smooth superficial
surface of our modern life; breaking out to the surface only
occasionally in the revelations of our divorce courts.)

It is a gracious fact, to which every woman who has achieved success or
accomplished good work in any of the fields generally apportioned to men
will bear witness, whether that work be in the field of literature, of
science, or the organised professions, that the hands which have been
most eagerly stretched our to welcome her have been those of men; that
the voices which have most generously acclaimed her success have been
those of male fellow-workers in the fields into which she has entered.

There is no door at which the hand of woman has knocked for admission
into a new field of toil but there have been found on the other side the
hands of strong and generous men eager to turn it for her, almost before
she knocks.

To those of us who, at the beginning of a new century, stand with shaded
eyes, gazing into the future, striving to descry the outlines of the
shadowy figures which loom before us in the distance, nothing seems of
so gracious a promise, as the outline we seem to discern of a condition
of human life in which a closer union than the world has yet seen shall
exist between the man and the woman: where the Walhalla of our old
Northern ances