This is the most difficult of all tasks; for here she must preserve the sudden anger or enthusiasm of her feeling, but purge it of arbitrariness and injustice. She must trust to her feeling’s unconscious sureness of direction, but secure it against the risks of foolhardiness. She must allow her feeling its mobility, but free it from the connection with caprice and untrustworthiness. She must keep her eyes for the individual, but yet be capable of lifting them to the universal. To be able to do all this, woman must be willing to learn of man where he is the stronger, without letting man’s scorn of womanly weaknesses or his pretensions to superiority mislead her into seeking a kind of strength which cannot be hers; for she could thus lose only what is already her own. Unfortunately, all the signs are not favourable to the hope that woman will pass through academies and carry on the service of the State without injury to her rapidity of view, delicacy of observation, and liberality of soul. “The conclusions of science,” “the laws of history,” “the demands of social security,” “the opportunity of compromise,” and all the other things that men pile up in the way of reform, are also alarming to woman’s courage, make her too ask for proofs instead of feeling strong in her intuition. In the university, the government department, and the business office the soul of woman also may run the risk of becoming tied by red tape, officially dry, amenable to public injustice, sober in the face of enthusiasm. Such official and business women will be as apprehensive as men of being suspected to be dreamers and agitators; they will be as logical in proving the unreasonableness of those who think for the future. In a word: when women bear men’s burdens they will also get their bent backs; when they earn their bread in the general field of work, their hands will also be hardened. But we may hope—and everything depends upon this hope—that woman will attain her social power before she has yet lost her special characteristics, and that she will then give her whole mind to bringing about new conditions, in which she will be able to keep her hands soft and her attitude upright. If this hope fails, then woman’s entrance into public life will not change, for a thousand years to come, its tendency to put safety before boldness; to allow prudence to chill enthusiasm, facts to clip the wings of inspiration, and practical considerations to quench ideas. The demands of humane feeling will continue to be blunted by the sharing of responsibility among many; nay, we shall even see woman uniting herself with the majority in curing the madness of idealists or—if this is impossible—in rendering them harmless.