Some curious results of the movement in favour of securing economic independence for women may be observed at the present time. The theory has of course in many cases been reduced in its application to an absurdity. Parents who thirty years ago would have expected all their daughters to stay at home until they were married, now with equal unwisdom wish them to pass from the school to the office, regardless of their natural bent, and as careless of their future prospects as before. Girls fitted by Nature for a home life, and for nothing else, lose their brightness and vitality in sedentary drudgery, losing at the same time all prospect of an escape from it. So also from a system under which the womenkind were expected to devote their evenings entirely to smoothing away the wrinkles and dispelling the bad tempers of their fathers and brothers after their harassing day’s work, we have suddenly passed to one under which all the daughters may come home equally cross and equally tired, with no hope that others will do their repairs for them, whether of temper or of clothes. But there are well-to-do families where the competent mother has no desire to hand over her duties to her daughters, and where their happiness is still the chief consideration. Here girls are allowed to earn--not their living--but an income by which they may relieve their parents of some of their cost of living and at the same time live at a greater cost. From both a social and an economic point of view there is much to be said for this plan, provided both parents and daughters realise that the latter have not, under this system, achieved economic independence, or the power to be economically independent. The girl who earns £100 a year by her work and receives another £100 a year in one form or another from her father is in all probability underselling no one; and indeed, in the consciousness that she is only being paid half her cost of living, may even, by her liberal views of what is a good salary, be inciting her less luxurious colleagues to raise their standard of living and remuneration. But if her work is not of a kind that gives training and power to pass on to higher paid posts, the woman worker in middle life will be in almost as unhappy a position if obliged to be self-supporting as the helpless women who thirty years ago used to advertise for posts as companions or governesses, stating as their only recommendation that they had never expected to have to perform the duties of either situation.