Although I would not have admitted it to Annabel for worlds, I could no longer shut my eyes to the fact that this passion for everything connected with the stage was gradually coming between my wife and myself: and--now that Annabel had told me of Fay's former ambition to take up acting as a profession--I was haunted by a horrible suspicion that my wife had returned to her first love, and now wished that she had chosen the stage instead of me. Of course, when Annabel talked of Fay's passion for the stage becoming a menace to our conjugal happiness, she confined that menace to the admiration and excitement which are an inevitable accompaniment of a theatrical career. She never saw the subtler and, to my mind, the more real danger of the love of art for art's sake, which exists in the breast of the true artist. It would never have occurred to my sister to imagine the possibility of any woman's caring more for her art than she cared for her husband: such things did not occur in the Victorian days wherein Annabel was brought up. In those dark ages it not infrequently happened that a man thought more about his profession or his business than he did about his wife: but that was humbly accepted as a matter of course by the meek helpmeet of those simpler times. "She could not understand, she loved," was the typical attitude of the wives of those days: and the possibility of the masculine mind failing to understand anything was a thing undreamed of in mid-Victorian philosophy. But the things that satisfied our grandmothers will not satisfy our wives; and the sooner we remnants of a bygone century learn that fact, the better for all concerned: I am not saying that this awakening of the Sleeping Beauty is either a good thing or a bad thing: I do not feel competent to lay down the law on such a big question: I only say that now she is awake, it is absurd to treat her as if she were still asleep. My own personal opinion is that the awakening of the sex as a whole makes for the improvement of Woman's character, but militates against her happiness, though I cherish a larger hope that it will finally conduce to her higher and truer happiness in the future. Still, even if it doesn't ever conduce to her happiness, the thing is there and has to be reckoned with. Childhood is the happiest part of life; but that is no excuse for arrested development. Woman at last has grown up, and has to be treated as a grown-up person and no longer as a child. At least that is how I look at the matter: but I really know so little about it that my opinion is neither here nor there. What I do know is that women nowadays have their interests and their professions the same as men have, and therefore it is just as likely for a woman to set art before her husband as it is for a man to set science before his wife--and, in my opinion, much more dangerous, as a man has by nature a far stronger sense of proportion than a woman has.