Looking round upon this cold, hard, and business-like world, however, in which the unremitting industry, so much exalted by Maeterlinck, will be the only activity and almost the only interest, it is not unlikely that millions of these female workers will ask themselves, with ever increasing perplexity and distress, what purpose it all serves, what good it all does, and what advantage or pleasure they derive from it. In their lives of stoic “purity” and monotonous bread-winning alone, they are likely to discover that even waiting for the end is intolerable, and many who will regard the normal term of human life as an unmerciful prolongation of their inexplicable misery will have recourse to all possible means of terminating their hardships. Gradually it will dawn upon a few independent and rebellious spirits that to have attempted to live like spirits before the spirit-world was reached, to have attempted to extinguish the joys and thrills of the body and to taste of the interests of angels, before having shuffled off this mortal coil—in fact to have planned and organized an æsthetic phenomenon such as life without retaining its æsthetic side, was a tragic and utterly brutal blunder. By the time, however, that this inevitable discovery is made—the only great discovery that an exclusively female community is ever likely to make—those who will be responsible for it will look aghast upon their own and their sisters’ bodies; and, perceiving with horror the impossibility at that late hour of recovering the functions, powers, and bodily parts, which centuries of disuse and degeneration will have withered to nothing, they will, if they still have enough spirit left, execrate and curse the memory of those who first envisaged their state as a future possibility, and who, having once conceived it as desirable, deliberately planned and schemed to bring it about. “Almighty God,” they will cry in desperation, “mercifully spared the bees our consciousness!” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IV FUTURE WOMAN