Closely related to the love of Publicity and the decay of Reticence is the change in the position of women. This is really a revolution, and it has so impartially pervaded all departments of life that one may plunge anywhere into the subject and find the same phenomenon. Fifty years ago the view that "comparisons don't become a young woman" still held the field, and, indeed, might have been much more widely extended. Nothing "became a young woman," which involved clear thinking or plain speaking or independent acting. Mrs. General and Mrs. Grundy were still powers in the land. "Prunes and Prism" were fair burlesques of actual shibboleths. "Fanny," said Mrs. General, "at present forms too many opinions. Perfect breeding forms none, and is never demonstrative." This was hardly a parody of the prevailing and accepted doctrine. To-day it would be difficult to find a subject on which contemporary Fannies do not form opinions, and express them with intense vigour, and translate them into corresponding action. Fifty years ago a hunting woman was a rarity, even though Englishwomen had been horsewomen from time immemorial. Lady Arabella Vane's performances were still remembered in the neighbourhood of Darlington, and Lady William Powlett's "scyarlet" habit was a tradition at Cottesmore. Mrs. Jack Villiers is the only horsewoman in the famous picture of the Quorn, and she suitably gave her name to the best covert in the Vale of Aylesbury. But now the hunting woman and the hunting girl pervade the land, cross their male friends at their fences, and ride over them when they lie submerged in ditches, with an airy cheerfulness which wins all hearts. In brief, it may be said that, in respect of outdoor exercises, whatever men and boys do women and girls do. They drive four-in-hand and tandem, they manipulate Motors, they skate and cycle, and fence and swim. A young lady lately showed me a snapshot of herself learning to take a header. A male instructor, classically draped, stood on the bank, and she kindly explained that "the head in the water was the man we were staying with." Lawn-tennis and croquet are regarded as the amusements of the mild and the middle-aged; the ardour of girlhood requires hockey and golf. I am not sure whether girls have taken to Rugby football, but only last summer I saw a girl's cricket eleven dispose most satisfactorily of a boy's team. I can well remember the time when a man, if perchance he met a lady while he was smoking in some rather unfrequented street, flung his cigar away and rather tried to look as if he had not been doing it. Yet so far have we travelled that not long ago, at a hospitable house not a hundred miles from Berkeley Square, the hostess and her daughter were the only smokers in a large luncheon-party, and prefaced their cigarettes by the courteous condition, "If you gentlemen don't mind."