The brain-woman’s time-tables know nothing of collisions. Her train-schedule is clear: nursing institute and kindergarten, school and dormitory for the children, whose number is fixed according to the requirements of society. The meals are served automatically from a common kitchen; the housekeeping is done by adding up the cash-book. In a costume designed for work or athletics, she goes to her study. When the work is done, there is five minutes’ conversation on the telephone with each of the children; two hours’ exercise in the open air. In the afternoon, ten minutes’ conversation on the telephone with her husband, thirty-five minutes’ pause for reception of ideas; the evening is given up to meetings of a utilitarian or social nature. On Sundays, the husband and children are invited, when three hours are set apart for the elimination of their defects, the rest of the time for profitable amusement. Such a woman never has a thought of the children while at work; never wants to snatch ten minutes’ extra chat with her husband, never has promptings at night. She wakes refreshed after the hygienic number of hours’ sleep; everything goes like clockwork—better indeed, for the woman of the future is never behind or ahead of time. But love’s selection will probably not tend towards any great increase of this type, whose present representatives seem physically and psychically so little affected by motherhood, that for their part one is inclined to believe in the stork! And with the other poor, weak, and “sensual” creatures the blood will no doubt continue to be “a strange sap,” which makes the head hot with anguish when it ought to be cool for thought; which forces the heart to beat with longing, when it ought to be still for deciding; which makes the nerves quiver with anxiety, when they ought to be tense for creation. And it is the consciousness of this which in her innermost heart makes the new woman shy of the love for which she longs. A little emotion she will not give; the great one would swallow up all the forces of her soul, and what would then become of the revelation of her personality, of the word she alone among all beings has within her, the word for the pronouncement of which she was born? Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile—interpreted by Barrès as _une clairvoyance sans tristesse_—expresses, as someone has said, the feminine individualism of the Renaissance. It is certain, on the other hand, that the feminine individualism of the present day has a clairvoyance that is sorrowful even to death.