Those persons are happiest in this restless and mutable world who are in love with change, who delight in what is new simply because it differs from what is old; who rejoice in every innovation, and find a strange alert pleasure in all that is, and that has never been before. With little things as with big ones, this sentiment is the sentiment of our day. “Unrest,” says Schopenhauer, “is the mark of existence,” and the many trifling details of ordinary life evince on every side the same keen relish for novelty, the same careless disregard of the familiar. Especially is this the case with women, who feel less wistfully than men the subtle charm of association, and who have less sympathy than men for the dear, faulty, unlovely, well-loved things of their youth. No woman could have written those pathetic lines of Mr. Lang’s on St. Andrews: “A little city, worn and gray,” the memory of whose rainwashed, desolate streets blots out from his mind all the beauty and the splendor of Oxford. And—to descend from serious to frivolous subjects—no woman can wholly appreciate that pleasant sketch of Mr. Barrie’s, called “My Tobacco Pouch,” which reveals a mental condition absolutely inexplicable to the most astute feminine apprehension. It is the instinctive desire of our sex for modernism that keeps rolling the great ball of trade. Manufacturers and shopkeepers would starve in common if they catered only to men, who not infrequently have a marked preference for the archaic. But women, to use the words of Sir Thomas Browne, are “complexionally propense to innovation.” With wonderful pliancy and adaptability they fit easily into new surroundings, make homes out of new houses, fill their rooms with new objects, and grasp a fair share of happiness in the enjoyment of novelty in every form, whether of fashion, art, literature, religion or philanthropy.