_Womanly!..._ Why, womanliness was a prime human quality, integrally necessary to the work of the world--a great positive quality, not a little passive one, productive, not sterile, of the spirit, not of the body. Womanliness was the mother and guardian of great social virtues: of a finer and deeper emotion, of more sensitive perceptions, of a subtler intuition of the sources of life, of an all-mothering sympathy, a more embracing tenderness. Womanliness had no more to do with the light bright plumage of the mating-season than a waxed mustache had to do with being a soldier. There was a time, he understood well, when the fact of womanhood had implied substantialities: when being a wife meant also being a domestic factory superintendent, not to mention being a continuous mother. That time was gone forever. You might argue for the passing, you might argue against it: meanwhile it had happened. Inexorable economics had dried the heart from the old tradition; and in the sudden vacuum thus created there moved and thrived anomalous little creatures who never knew that they had lost all touch with reality. Untroubled by a rumor of change, Angela held contentedly to the remnant, a low ideal of herself. But it was not so with her finer sisters. For the passing of the old womanliness of four walls and dependence had flung a window wide to a nobler prospect and a vaster horizon. And already the woman of to-morrow was rising in her lusty strength to prove her fundamental racial virtue, her womanliness, upon nothing less than the world. Well, hadn't he told Mary long ago that the object of all this was only to make women more like themselves? In that, he would stake his life, he had been exactly right. * * * * * A concrete High School smote across the vision of the seer, and the cloud-stepper's feet trod but the hard sidewalk again. Groping for truth upon his favorite subject, he had been briefly lost to the issues of the practical: he had a power of concentration, as he would have been the first to admit. But the flight of his rhetoric was, after all, only an incident of his indignation and distress; which sentiments, he knew all the time, yet had to be faced on their own account. And now, as he rounded his last corner, and his destination rose abruptly before him, Charles recalled for what he had been walking so fast and far. Or, no ... What was he coming for exactly? It was all very fine and easy, as a writer, to polish up demolishing phrases for poor little Angela. But what did he, as a man and a friend, have to do for Mary Wing?