We may safely assert that no middle-class woman of average intelligence, educated in the high schools established during the last twenty-five years, is unable to earn a living if she chooses to do so. And one very important change has taken place. Whereas thirty years ago it was the rule for many parents, although with little hope of bequeathing an income to their daughters, to support them at home in expectation of their marriage, this lack of foresight is becoming rare. Our schools are no longer staffed by women who have begun their work in life driven to it by necessity or disappointment. More and more it is being recognised by parents that girls should be fitted to be self-supporting; and the tendency among the girls themselves is to concentrate their energies on the profession they take up, and to regard marriage as a possibility which may some day call them away from the path they are pursuing, but which should not be allowed to interfere with their plans in the meantime. At the period of life, then, when there is the most opportunity of marriage there is now the least excuse for the woman who marries merely to obtain a livelihood. The economic advance has at least been sufficient to enable women to preserve their self-respect. Next it must be admitted that the work which educated women are paid to do is in the main useful and satisfying work. They no longer think of supporting themselves by acting as useful companions to useless women; nor do they have to spend their time in imperfectly imparting valueless facts in the schoolroom. The teaching and nursing professions, which include more educated women in their ranks than any other, have made great advances. In both every worker who wishes to be efficient can make herself so, and while youth and health last those occupations are absorbing enough in themselves to be worth living for. At the same time, the women who succeed in either of these callings must be above the average in ability. The merely average girl must turn to some occupation in which more people are wanted, but for which less exceptional skill is required. Generally she looks for it in one of two directions: she either becomes a clerk or some kind of domestic help. Failing marriage, the latter occupation offers chances, but not certainties, of making warm friends, and having abiding human interests. But clerical work in the case of the average woman can rarely be in itself satisfying; it is a means, not an end.