We are to understand that it was the domination and the selfishness of man that created the lamentable type of nineteenth-century “old maid.” But who were unkindest to Miss Wardle? Her nieces, members of her own sex. Who created the typical “old maid” and terrible bore, Miss Bates? Another “old maid,” Jane Austen. The fact is, old maids like other human beings have their foibles. Are these never to be put into a book? Feminism seems to make its disciples terribly serious. Miss La Creevy is Dickens’s example of the _femme artiste_. See, says Mme. Villard, how types of “independent women” are caricatured! She cannot laugh at Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig, because they testify to the social contempt attaching to the nursing profession at their date! Has it never occurred to her that novels are sometimes written merely as novels and not as _dossiers_ in a “case” for the “evolution” of woman? After all, however, there are plenty of serious novelists who do supply good evidence—more particularly the quasi-propagandists like Mrs. Gaskell (when she chose) and Mrs. Humphry Ward (sometimes), and (nearly always) Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Wells. Mme. Villard makes effective play with these. She has no difficulty, for instance, in showing the immense economic advance of the woman-worker during the last century, though even here her eye seems too exclusively fixed on her own sex. True, women were the chief victims of the old “factory” and “sweating” systems, but the amelioration of their condition, if I am not mistaken, came only as part of the general amelioration in the condition of “labour,” without sex-distinction.