I am much flattered by your kind invitation to discuss the Advanced Woman, but an initial difficulty suggests itself to me. Can one discuss the Advanced Woman if this Advanced Woman herself is non-existent? I am aware, of course, that she has stridden large of late in the pages of feminine fiction, but is she not as extinct (before she has ever existed) as her DODO title? Let me make my own confession. I have used, if I did not invent, the A. W. I have secured a remunerative public. Once on a time I wrote of life as I found it. I used my eyes and ears, and endeavoured to let the world have the result in the old-fashioned, wholesome story. It was a dreary failure. The critics commended my style, and the public let me severely alone. _Nous avons changé tout cela._ A theatrical manager who finds his musical piece begin to drag, saves the situation by a New Edition--in other words, by two new songs and some fresh dances. In a similar way I secured a reputation by dragging in (at times by her very heel) the Advanced Woman. True that she resembles no one in actual existence, true, indeed, that she is outrageously and offensively improbable, but the public were not happy till they got her. They're happy now. So am I. [Illustration] [Sidenote: Mrs. Shriek Shriekon speaks out.] I should have thought that _my_ views on the Advanced Woman were sufficiently well known; but, since you ask my opinion, I may say at once that I lose no opportunity of inveighing against this _fin-de-siècle_ abomination. Once on a time it was not thought unbecoming for a woman to be modest and retiring. She knew her sphere, and, queen in her own selected world, she did not aspire to a sovereignty which naturally belonged to others. If they were alive to-day (and, after all, some of them are), our grandmothers would hardly know their GRAND children--the Heavenly Twins. I am glad that I am permitted to keep burning the sacred lamp of the Old Womanhood. Indeed, it looks as if the jeers which a thoughtless world has hitherto reserved for the Old Maid were being transferred to the Old Woman. Yet to those who have never yielded to the spell of the latter-day notions, there is only dismay in the spectacle of the Advanced Woman sweeping triumphantly on, with her mind full of sex-problems she has not brains enough to understand, and her breath stained with the trace of cigarettes she does not care to conceal. Wholesomeness dies at being dubbed old-fashioned; Modesty does not survive the disgrace of not being up to date. It's a bad world, my masters, and I'm never tired of saying so. [Sidenote: Ann U. Woman dreams of the Future.]