unhampered concentration on a purpose which are its compensations for the inevitable loneliness. In the near future, it seems probable, the English girl will enter bachelorhood as fully and as regularly as an English boy. The old idea of its being unsettling or harmful is quickly passing away. English girls in general are nearly as capable of looking after themselves as their brothers, nor are they more likely than they to withstand the attractions of matrimony when they are offered. In the meantime they will prove themselves of value to society in some definite activity, instead of going shopping, arranging flowers and staying about indefinitely in other people’s houses. Mothers and fathers it is true, will be left forlorn a little earlier, but they will have to put up with it, and it will teach them to preserve the charm of one another’s society with more care against the day when, after the crowded cares of parenthood have vanished, nothing else is left to them. But, to return to my original point, will the bachelor woman be a stabiliser or will she be disruptive? She will have the feminine instinct for stability and definite surroundings: she will never become so fluid a being socially as a man. Nevertheless, for the time of her bachelorhood she will not so easily indulge those instincts and will be likely, in the first flush of freedom, to hold them of small importance. She is, moreover, apt in these days to be carried away by her head farther than her heart would naturally take her, and her head, like a newly hoisted sail, will belly in the wind of any ready theorist. Girls are poor critics of ideas, and are apt to grasp at them with a touch of flighty passion which is more dangerous than the intellectual trifling of young men, who can play with them as keenly yet as unemotionally as they play with tennis balls. The one foe always lying in wait for bachelor women is hysteria, which takes the form of flightiness in the young and of a sour wilfulness in the older who succumb to it. Disruptive tendencies in the state will always find fruitful ground among hysterical females, who will push a theory to unpractical limits, not out of honest conviction, but from pure passion. But the danger of any permanent damage, provided always that the nation as a whole maintains its sanity, from this source need not be too seriously considered. A career or a profession is in itself a stabilising influence, and, now that women in England have few specific grounds for discontents on the score of sex-inequalities, the sparks of hysteria can fly harmlessly upwards without being gathered into a blaze. However, we shall see. The good Englishwoman, married or single, is riding forward at a round pace into the future. She is not likely to lose her bearings, but we shall all suffer if she does. It rests with her teachers to endow her richly with the faculty of finding her way, even in the dark. CHAPTER X THE ENGLISHWOMAN AT WORK