tand the
exactions and strain of his terrible profession. No woman goes
blithely into surgery or medicine merely to have a career or to make a
living, although ten thousand girls to her one will essay to write, or
paint, or clerk, or cultivate her bit of voice, with barely a thought
expended upon her fitness or the obligations involved.

But the woman who deliberately enters the profession of healing has,
almost invariably, a certain nobility of mind, a lack of personal
selfishness, and a power of devotion to the race quite unknown to the
average woman, even the woman of genius when seeking a career.

During the Great War there have been few women doctors at the Front,
but hundreds of women nurses, and they have been as intrepid and
useful as their rivals in sex. They alone, by their previous
experience of human suffering, bad enough at best, were in a measure
prepared for the horrors of war and the impotence of men laid low. But
that will not restore any lost illusions, for they took masculine
courage for granted with their mothers' milk, and they cannot fail to
be imbued to the marrow with a bitter sense of waste and futility, of
the monstrous sacrifice of the best blood of their generation.

II

THE TRIUMPH OF MIDDLE-AGE

I

Certain doctors of England have gone on record as predicting a
lamentable physical future for the army of women who are at present
doing the heavy work of men, particularly in the munition factories.
They say that the day-long tasks which involve incessant bending and
standing and lifting of heavy weights will breed a terrible reaction
when the war ends and these women are abruptly flung back into
domestic life. There is almost no man's place in the industrial world
that English women are not satisfactorily filling, with either muscle
or brains, and the doctors apprehend a new problem in many thousand
neurotics or otherwise broken-down women at the close of the war.
Although this painful result of women's heroism would leave just that
many women less to compete for the remaining men sound of wind and
limb, still, if true, it raises the acute question: Are women the
equal of men in all things? Their deliverance from the old marital
fetish, and successful invasion of so many walks of life, have made
such a noise in the world since woman took the bit between her teeth,
more or less en masse, that the feministic paean of triumph has almost
smothered an occasional protest from those co