The married women, at all events, will resist to the last: the weak threads in the womanly warp—and I mean weak in the sense of not withstanding disruptive influences—are the bachelor women. Nowadays it is foolish to talk of “old maids” and “_coiffer Sainte Cathérine_,” or to use any other patronising phrase for unmarried women which implies that they have missed the only vocation of their sex. Already before the war this attitude was becoming _passé_ in England, and the war has definitely bundled it into the lumber room. The enormous activity of women, young and old, during the war cannot subside leaving no effect at all, and one of its most permanent effects is that large numbers of women have learned to live as self-sufficing lives as men, working independently for an adequate return, dwelling in camps or colonies or bachelor companionships or even in solitude, and using their leisure as the spirit moved them. Young girls who ordinarily would not have dreamed of leaving the home where they were doing nothing in particular, and older women who dabbled more or less aimlessly in existence because they could not catch a proper hold of it, both learned the happiness which comes from doing something in particular. They found in regular work an emancipation of which they had never dreamed: it solved their riddles and blew away their fantasies, besides removing them from those hundred and one insidious little distractions which waste more than half the time of unoccupied women. If this emancipation led to some follies, it led also to much wisdom. The value of regularity became patent to many for the first time: the settling effect of a definite aim for each day, the fact that, in the long run, work passes the time much more quickly than amusement, were revelations; and the realisation of holding a career, albeit a temporary one, in her own two hands gave to many a woman a new assurance and a new pride which were precious as jewels. Thereafter they could never regard with equanimity the possibility of a return to the older more dependent or less purposeful life. The cessation of wartime employment obscured their immediate prospect but did not cloud their new ideals, for they had learnt a new and healthy discontent. It was not that the other ideal of women, marriage and a home, lost its attraction—far from it: but, it had become clear that women need not wait, like wares in a market place, till the arrival of a purchaser, doing odd jobs and maintaining as long as possible the freshness of their looks. They had realised the real virtues of the bachelor state, which are not its opportunities for disorder, laxity and idleness, but, in youth, its freedom, its mobility and its sense of hammering out life with a will on the anvil of ambition, and, in maturer age, the full interests, the easy and untrammelled relations, the opportunities for many sided intercourse without responsibility and the power of