"In one of my books I had occasion to mention the case, communicated to me, of a woman in Italy who preferred to perish in the flames, when the house was on fire, rather than shock her modesty by coming out of it without her clothes. So far as it has been within my power I have always sought to place bombs beneath the world in which that woman lived, so that it might altogether go up in flames. I read of a troop ship torpedoed in the Mediterranean and almost immediately sunk within sight of land. A nurse was still on deck. She proceeded to strip, saying to the men about her: 'Excuse me, boys, I must save the Tommies.' She swam around and saved a dozen of them. That woman belongs to my world. Now and again I have come across the like, sweet and feminine and daring women who have done things as brave as that, and even much braver because more complexly difficult and always I feel my heart swinging like a censer before them, going up in a perpetual fragrance of love and adoration. "I dream of a world in which the spirits of women are flames stronger than fire, a world in which modesty has become courage and yet remains modesty, a world in which women are as unlike men as ever they were in the world I sought to destroy, a world in which women shine with a loveliness of self-revelation as enchanting as ever the old legends told, and yet a world which would immeasurably transcend the old world in the self sacrificing passion of human service." Thus far I have presented the silver lining of what some timid persons call the cloud of modernism in love. To be perfectly fair and honest, I must now mention the cloud itself, altho, like all clouds, it will soon blow away or resolve itself into a few drops of water, tears, perhaps, also of a temporary nature. =The Unadapted Woman.= The sudden rise of women in certain fields of activity has left quite a number of them unpleasantly unadapted. Certain positions, well filled by women, and which pay rather high salaries, demand but a modicum of intellectual development, little culture or manners. The women who fill them, and who generally come from the working class, financially well off, accustomed to expensive clothes and to respectful treatment on the part of their coworkers or employers, are loath to enter a married relationship or even a liaison, with men of their social set, that is, having the same culture or lack of culture, for those men are financially lower and lack certain manners which they expect to find in their environment. A husband of the working class type could not, in case of pregnancy, give such a woman the comfort which she now craves. Motherhood would deprive her, temporarily at least, from an income which nothing could replace. Nor could she become subservient to a husband after being very independent and having become slightly snobbish on account of the attentions she has received from men financially superior to her.