Karen often seemed keenly to wonder at this unsatisfactoriness of men. She cultivated them, walking always in her magic circle, but they slipped and grew dimmer. She had her fling of feminism towards the end of her year. She left the university to become secretary for a state suffrage leader. Under the stress of public life she became fierce and serious. She abandoned the picturesque peasant costumes which she had affected, and made herself hideous in mannish skirts and waists. She felt the woes of women, and saw everywhere the devilish hand of the exploiting male. If she ever married, she would have a house separate from her husband. She would be no parasite, no man’s woman. She spoke of the “human sex,” and set up its norms for her acquaintanceships. When I saw Karen later, however, she was herself again. She had taken up again the tissue of personal relations. But in that reconstituted world all her friends seemed to be women. Her taste of battle had seemed to fortify and enlighten that ancient shrinking; her old annoyance that men should be abruptly different from what she would have them. She was intimate with feminists whose feminism had done little more for their emotional life than to make them acutely conscious of the cloven hoof of the male. Karen, in her brooding way, was able to give this philosophy a far more poetical glamor than any one I knew. Her woman friends adored her, even those who had not acquired that mystic sense of “loyalty to woman” and did not believe that no man was so worthy that he might not be betrayed with impunity. Karen, on her part, adored her friends, and the care that had been spent on unworthy men now went into toning up and making subtle the women around her. She did a great deal for them, and was constantly discovering godlike creatures in shop and street and bringing them in to be mystically mingled with her circle. Naturally it is Karen’s married friends who cause her greatest concern. Eternal vigilance is the price of their salvation from masculine tyranny. In the enemy’s country, under at least the nominal yoke, these married girls seem to Karen subjects for her prayer and aid. She has become exquisitely sensitive to any aggressive gestures on the part of these creatures with whom her dear friends have so inexplicably allied themselves, and she is constantly in little subtle intrigues to get the victim free or at least armisticed. She broods over her little circle, inscrutable, vigilant, a true vestal virgin on the sacred hearth of woman. Husbands are doubtless better for that silent enemy whom they see jealously adoring their wives. Karen still leaves trails of mystery and desire where she goes, but it is as a woman’s woman that I see her now, and, I am ashamed to say, ignore her. Men could not be crowded into her Jamesian world and she has solved the problem by obliterating them. She will not live by means of them. Since she does not know how to live with them she lives without them.