The Ultra-Feminine, for the most part shallow and mindless (although many clever women belong to this order), absorbed in complacent culture of her oftentimes alluring personality, enhancing it, attiring it, developing its charm and graces, eager of homage and of tribute, is example of that Parasitism Miss Schreiner condemns in the sex; example of qualities normally making for beauty, but from loss of balance, owing to warp, hereditary or of misdirection, morbidly feeding upon themselves. This Parasitism is seen in its worst guise in the vast armies of prostitutes, who in every clime and epoch ravage the fair fruits of human life and achievement. Against this Parasitism in herself, self-absorbing, self-indulgent, enervating--defect of her reposefulness, of her æstheticism and vital self-consciousness--every woman needs to be upon her guard; to repress with firmness the smooth easy lapse it prompts toward sloth and pleasure; to exorcise the soft dry-rot of it, by power of aspiration and by prayer of ministry. (For noble truth it is that _Laborare est orare_.) The Woman's Movement did good service for the sex in the early chapters of its history, when it made for due education of woman's higher masculine inherences; intelligence, application, self-reliance; as also in finding further fields of usefulness and self-expression for her. But unfortunately in the later chapters, over-cultivation of these traits has increasingly annulled and extinguished her own. And this with the unforeseen, disquieting resultant that a compensatory movement has set in apace among that other faction of the sex. So that the more mannish the Feminists become in mode and aim, the more womanish become the Effeminates. Thus, albeit sincerely despising and decrying this, Feminism has nevertheless indirectly fostered the growth of Effeminacy. While, by supplying it with ever further liberty and scope for the indulgence of its freaks and failings, Feminist propaganda has directly played into its hands. Motherhood strikes deeper roots of attribute even in the Ultra-Feminine; brings thin streams of altruism to her neurasthenic breasts. In her children she forgets clothes, grows less greedy of masculine tribute, forgoes pleasures and excitements that had been the breath of life to her.