The woman question—is it not one to be shunned? I mean the question, not the theme itself, though one may recommend Laura Marholm’s volumes. Frau Marholm is a Scandinavian, and Northern women must have been bound with iron social gyves, to judge by the quality of their protestant literature. Ibsen, Björnson, even Strindberg—whose erratic pendulum swings to the other extreme—are full of the heady polemics of sex. Sex—why, one sickens of the subject after reading problem plays and novels. To all American women between the ages of eighteen and eighty I say study Laura Marholm’s Studies in the Psychology of Woman. The dissatisfied ones, those who really believe all they read, may perhaps realize how much better off is The Unquiet Sex—this capital phrase is of Helen Watterson Moody’s coining—in America. Little wonder that there is a woman movement in Europe. For its psychology read Marholm. Best of all, here is a woman telling us secrets, secrets not to be captured by men watchful of the Sphinx that Defies. And it is a sad corrective for masculine presumption, masculine vanity. _We_ are only tolerated. Some of us have known that for years; here it is elevated to the dignity of a psychological system. These long-haired, soft-eyed animals, as Guy de Maupassant described them, are our true critics weighing us ever in scales that are mortifyingly candid, excusing us if they love us, but after all only _tolerating us_, allowing the lords of creation to kneel in humble attitudes at the shrine and rewarded at the end by—toleration. And if this is the case on the Continent, where the equality of women is as yet a half-hatched idea, how is it in America, where she is queen, queen from kitchen to palace? I think Mrs. Marholm herself would be amazed, and mayhap after five years’ residence here would write a book about the Wrongs of Man. Her Six Famous Women betrays the writer’s keenness of vision, the Studies reveal breadth of idea and judgments. She does not belong to the “Shrieking Sisterhood.” She is a woman, a defender of home and family. I assure you I enjoyed her book far better than Zola’s Fecondité—that most miraculously dull and moral tract. Tolstoy is the remote parent of both books, though Marholm has her own feminine point of attack. No man may hope to understand women as does a woman. It was Zangwill, I think, who said that all women writers are of value—do they not tell us the secrets of their sex? This is hardly polite, but it is true. When the “messages” of George Eliot and Charlotte Bronté have grown stale from usage—all truths breed rust after a time—their unconscious self-portraitures will preserve them from those giant moths, the critics.