That the time has not yet come for any such revolutionary change is obvious, but if the signs and portents of the last decade or two do not lie, we may safely assume that the time _will_ come, and that the present legal conditions of wedlock will be altered in some way or other. Fifteen years ago there was a sudden wave of rebellion against these conditions, and a renewed interest in the sex question showed itself in an outbreak of problem novels--a term which later came to be used as one of reproach. Perhaps the most important of these was Grant Allen’s _The Woman Who Did_. I can recall as a schoolgirl the excitement it aroused and my acute disappointment when it was forcibly commandeered from me by an irate governess who apparently took no interest in these enthralling subjects. A host of imitators followed _The Woman Who Did_; some of them entirely illiterate, all of them offering some infallible key to the difficult maze of marriage. Worse still was the reaction that inevitably followed, when realism was tabooed in fiction, and sickly romance possessed the field. _The Yellow Book_ and similar strange exotics of the first period withered and died, and the cult of literature (!) for the British Home was shortly afterwards in full blast. There followed an avalanche of insufferably dull and puerile magazines, in which the word _Sex_ was strictly taboo, and the ideal aimed at was apparently the extreme opposite to real life. It was odd how suddenly the sex note--(as I will call it for want of a better word)--disappeared from the press. Psychology was pronounced ‘off,’ and plots were the order of the day. Many names well-known at that time and associated with a _flair_ for delicate delineation of character, disappeared from the magazine contents bill and the publisher’s list, whilst facile writers who could turn out mild detective yarns or tales of adventure and gore were in clover. Signs are not wanting that the pendulum of public interest has now swung back again, and another wave of realism in fiction and inquiry into the re-adjustment of the conjugal bond is imminent. But the pendulum will have to swing back and forth a good many times however, before the relations between the sexes succeed in finding that new form of which Tolstoy speaks. What the revival I have foretold will accomplish remains to be seen. What did the last agitation achieve? Practically nothing; a few women may have been impelled to follow in the footsteps of Grant Allen’s Herminia to their undying sorrow, and possibly a good many precocious young girls, who read the literature of that day, may have given their parents some anxiety by their revolutionary ideas on the value of the holy estate. But when that trio so irresistible to the feminine heart came along--the Ring, the Trousseau, and the House of My Own, to say nothing of the solid, twelve-stone, prospective husband--which among these advanced damsels remembered the sermon on the hill-top?