“I suppose,” said the Girton Girl—to my surprise she spoke with entire absence of indignation. As a rule, the Girton Girl stands for what has been termed “divine discontent” with things in general. In the course of time she will outlive her surprise at finding the world so much less satisfactory an abode than she had been led to suppose—also her present firm conviction that, given a free hand, she could put the whole thing right in a quarter of an hour. There are times even now when her tone suggests less certainty of her being the first person who has ever thought seriously about the matter. “I suppose,” said the Girton Girl, “it comes of education. Our grandmothers were content to fill their lives with these small household duties. They rose early, worked with their servants, saw to everything with their own eyes. Nowadays we demand time for self-development, for reading, for thinking, for pleasure. Household drudgery, instead of being the object of our life, has become an interference to it. We resent it.” “The present revolt of woman,” continued the Minor Poet, “will be looked back upon by the historian of the future as one of the chief factors in our social evolution. The ‘home’—the praises of which we still sing, but with gathering misgiving—depended on her willingness to live a life of practical slavery. When Adam delved and Eve span—Adam confining his delving to the space within his own fence, Eve staying her spinning-wheel the instant the family hosiery was complete—then the home rested upon the solid basis of an actual fact. Its foundations were shaken when the man became a citizen and his interests expanded beyond the domestic circle. Since that moment woman alone has supported the institution. Now she, in her turn, is claiming the right to enter the community, to escape from the solitary confinement of the lover’s castle. The ‘mansions,’ with common dining-rooms, reading-rooms, their system of common service, are springing up in every quarter; the house, the villa, is disappearing. The story is the same in every country. The separate dwelling, where it remains, is being absorbed into a system. In America, the experimental laboratory of the future, the houses are warmed from a common furnace. You do not light the fire, you turn on the hot air. Your dinner is brought round to you in a travelling oven. You subscribe for your valet or your lady’s maid. Very soon the private establishment, with its staff of unorganised, quarrelling servants, of necessity either over or underworked, will be as extinct as the lake dwelling or the sandstone cave.” “I hope,” said the Woman of the World, “that I may live to see it.” “In all probability,” replied the Minor Poet, “you will. I would I could feel as hopeful for myself.”