contact with concrete personalities in the more hazy realm of units, aggregations and impersonal figures. Where she calculates in days the man calculates in years, and, though she may know with surprising accuracy the idiosyncrasies and capabilities of a staff within the immediate survey of her own eyes, she leaves it to the man to devise the large schemes which will find useful employment for thousands. Possibly this wider and more impersonal grasp will never come to women: if so, we shall have to learn more accurately the reason why, for the impossibility is now not obvious. With organisation and combination becoming more and more the rule in every department of human activity, it will be a great loss to the community if, through women’s failure to extend their administrative capacity over wider areas, the fostering care and sympathetic penetration peculiar to women are confined to narrow circles. In that sense they have great need to develop the productive mind and also the gift of leadership, which is the art of attaching energies rather than affections. The proof of clear aims and a keen vision, single-hearted devotion to a worthy end, judicious selection of means to attain it, quick recognition of capacity in others and confidence in it when recognised, care in preparation, incisiveness in action, these are the qualities which draw men after them in spite of personal incompatibilities, and harness a multitude of scattered energies, at their highest efficiency, into a single co-ordinated effort. Women, so far, have been wanting in these qualities, and yet what could they not do if they had them? Joan of Arc and Napoleon both led armies: one touched the hearts of men, the other their pride. A woman who to the moral force of Joan could add the executive genius of Napoleon might lead the world straight to the millennium. So extreme a combination of unusual qualities is improbable: but it is by no means inconceivable that some Sylvia commended by all the swains should develop the practical powers of a Whiteley or a Burbidge, a phenomenon which might occur sooner than the emergence from among women of a really commanding master-intellect. It may happen in time that a woman starting from small beginnings may earn millions and leave them to her sons as any Carnegie or Pierpont Morgan of to-day. The fact that it now seems impossible is a proof of what women have yet to achieve rather than of their natural limitations. I should not like to lay odds against the success of women as great originators of commercial enterprise, but I would modestly back my opinion that such pioneers will as quickly arise within these islands as from any part of the world outside them. CHAPTER XI THE ENGLISHWOMAN AT PLAY