This is the case in business, in politics, in society, to some extent everywhere, with men, and even women, who in one way or another display their strength and courage. They are not necessarily bandits, but they all desire to get only joys, or at least violent sensations, out of life, and aim at throwing it away afterwards like a squeezed orange. These are the mad individualists who will not observe any measure in enjoyment, and see in the world only a personal inheritance to be wasted by them. I know them well, through having often myself looked in their direction with the fever of desire. Never has the possibility of a future life been so insolently rejected, and never have we, as some of us now do, exposed ourselves with such foolhardiness to all dangers of destruction, as though it were necessary to make a blaze of this, our only life, in order to discover in it some divine fire. We plunge it in the whirl-wind of death to increase its intensity for a few precarious moments. Romanticism, by proclaiming the right to passion, the right to happiness, the right to freedom, encouraged the development of individual force. A new romanticism extols it to-day, and it is chiefly women who preach the gospel. Their invasion of contemporary literature is only one symptom of a more general feminism. Less apt than man to grasp the complexity of social and moral life, the new woman exhausts all her demands in one cry and with a single leap lands at the road’s end to which she is led by confidence in her own powers and by her narrow view of the universe which centres wholly in self. At last individualism has found its philosopher in a poet, Nietzsche,--much misunderstood, by the way,--who grants to the Superman all rights. And why should one not believe in a Superman, especially if one is a modern woman? But is it not rather curious to call that doctrine the fear of living which glorifies life and doubles its intensity? I am reminded of a little story which used to be told to me when I was a child. It is the story of a ball of string that a fairy--good or bad--gave to a little boy with these mysterious words: “This ball represents the length of your life. Each moment will shorten it. I have not the power to increase the time nor even to suspend it, but I have the power of shortening it, and that I give to you. Whenever in your life you come upon hours that are useless, sorrowful, or unpleasant, and wish to shorten them, pull the string and the hours will pass. Farewell and be wise.”