By way of reducing the "misanthropic" attitude of some of the "New Women" to absurdity, _Punch_ reported a probably apocryphal dialogue between two men: "I say, old man, is it true that your wife has been asked to resign at the Omphale Club?" "Well, yes; you see, the Committee found out that she'd been guilty of ungentlemanly conduct." But what exasperated _Punch_ most of all was the decadent preciosity of the irregulars who espoused the cause of the New Womanhood. One need only mention "The Woman who Wouldn't Do," illustrated _à la_ Beardsley, where "Yellow Book" morality is burlesqued in the phrase "marriage is a degrading system, nurtured under the purple hangings of the tents of iniquity." These moods of disgust seldom lasted long. _Punch_ was no wholesale hater of modernity, and in his verses on "The Real New Woman" frankly admitted that there was much in her to admire. One notes a change of ideal in the absence of any mention of her cooking qualifications; and in the admission that "she's splendid at seeing a joke," _Punch_ acknowledges a great advance on the buxom but humourless damsels of Leech. The first mention of a Ladies' Football Club in 1895 brings home to us the fact that what passed for prejudice in 1895 with enthusiastic advocates of sex equality has been confirmed by the judgment of those best qualified to judge down to 1921. _Punch's_ epigram on woman's "Asiatic hunger for degrees" represents a passing mood rather than his general attitude to the demand. "The lady students of the Universities," wrote _The Times_ on March 13, 1896, "have received a cruel series of rebuffs in the last few days. On Tuesday week the Congregation of the University of Oxford refused to admit them to the B.A. degree. On Tuesday last it followed up this blow by rejecting all the resolutions proposed as alternatives. Yesterday the Cambridge Senate inflicted the unkindest cut of all by practically imitating the ungallant example of Oxford." Yet, instead of exulting over their defeat, _Punch_ was decidedly sympathetic in his cartoon of Minerva, with her owl in a cage, met at the gates of the Oxford Schools by a corpulent bespectacled Don, who observes, "Very sorry, Miss Minerva, but perhaps you are not aware that this is a monastic establishment." One notes a certain inconsistency in _Punch's_ condemning women for their disregard of the fine art of gastronomy, preferring "a tray on a rickety side-table" or the haphazard arrangements of a picnic to regularity and comfort at meals, and almost in the same breath rebuking them for flouting the sweet domesticities of home and indulging in extravagant pleasures in public. Another interesting sign of the times is recorded a couple of years later in "The Modern Woman's _Vade Mecum_"--showing a reaction against the old notion that the blue stocking must be above any regard for appearances. Here the governing idea is that cleverness need not be divorced from fascination; that fine heads should be covered with