order is better than the old, and the modern phase of womanhood more beautiful, more useful to the community at large, more elevating to general morality than was the ancient. But the whole matter hangs on this proviso; and until it can be shown for certain that the latter phase is to be undeniably the better we will hold by the former. There are certain old--superstitions must we call them?--in our ideas of women, with which we should be loth to part. For instance, the infinite importance of a mother's influence over her children, and the joy that she herself took in their companionship--the pleasure that it was to her to hold a baby in her arms--her delight and maternal pride in the beauty, the innocence, the quaint ways, the odd remarks, the half-embarrassing questions, the first faint dawnings of reason and individuality, of the little creatures to whom she had given life and who were part of her very being--that pleasure and maternal pride were among the characteristics we used to ascribe to womanliness; as was also the mother's power of forgetting herself for her children, of merging herself in them as they grew older, and finding her own best happiness in theirs. But among the advanced women who despise the tame teachings of what was once meant by womanliness, maternity is considered a bore rather than a blessing; the children are shunted to the side when they come; and ignorant undisciplined nurses are supposed to do well for wages what mothers will not do for love. Also we held it as womanliness when women resolutely refused to admit into their presence, to discuss or hear discussed before them, impure subjects, or even doubtful ones; when they kept the standard of delicacy, of purity, of modesty, at a high level, and made men respect, even if they could not imitate. Now the running between them and men whose delicacy has been rubbed off long ago by the intimate contact of coarse life is very close; and some of them go even beyond those men whose lives have been of a quiet and unexperimental kind. Nothing indeed, is so startling to a man who has not lived in personal and social familiarity with certain subjects, and who has retained the old chivalrous superstitions about the modesty and innocent ignorance of women, as the easy, unembarrassed coolness with which his fair neighbour at a dinner-table will dash off into thorny paths, managing between the soup and the grapes to run through the whole gamut of improper subjects.