an recall as a schoolgirl the excitement it aroused
and my acute disappointment when it was forcibly commandeered from me by
an irate governess who apparently took no interest in these enthralling
subjects. A host of imitators followed _The Woman Who Did_; some of them
entirely illiterate, all of them offering some infallible key to the
difficult maze of marriage.

Worse still was the reaction that inevitably followed, when realism was
tabooed in fiction, and sickly romance possessed the field. _The Yellow
Book_ and similar strange exotics of the first period withered and died,
and the cult of literature (!) for the British Home was shortly
afterwards in full blast. There followed an avalanche of insufferably
dull and puerile magazines, in which the word _Sex_ was strictly taboo,
and the ideal aimed at was apparently the extreme opposite to real life.
It was odd how suddenly the sex note--(as I will call it for want of a
better word)--disappeared from the press. Psychology was pronounced
'off,' and plots were the order of the day. Many names well-known at
that time and associated with a _flair_ for delicate delineation of
character, disappeared from the magazine contents bill and the
publisher's list, whilst facile writers who could turn out mild
detective yarns or tales of adventure and gore were in clover.

Signs are not wanting that the pendulum of public interest has now swung
back again, and another wave of realism in fiction and inquiry into the
re-adjustment of the conjugal bond is imminent. But the pendulum will
have to swing back and forth a good many times however, before the
relations between the sexes succeed in finding that new form of which
Tolstoy speaks. What the revival I have foretold will accomplish remains
to be seen. What did the last agitation achieve? Practically nothing;
a few women may have been impelled to follow in the footsteps of Grant
Allen's Herminia to their undying sorrow, and possibly a good many
precocious young girls, who read the literature of that day, may have
given their parents some anxiety by their revolutionary ideas on the
value of the holy estate. But when that trio so irresistible to the
feminine heart came along--the Ring, the Trousseau, and the House of My
Own, to say nothing of the solid, twelve-stone, prospective
husband--which among these advanced damsels remembered the sermon on the
hill-top?

Yet in the fourteen years that have elapsed since the publication of
_The