No recent development has been more remarkable than that of athletics among women, particularly among Englishwomen. We are apt to forget how short a time it is since George du Maurier drew his beautiful young ladies elegantly disporting themselves in flounced skirts on the tennis lawn, wielding racquets with diminutive heads and as taut as landing nets with which they gently lobbed back the ball to a swain in side-whiskers and knickerbockers. Women, of course, have always played. Nausicaa and her maidens innocently tossed a ball to and fro before the wondering eyes of shipwrecked Ulysses: the battledore and shuttlecock are nearly as old as cork and feathers. Pastimes, too, which involved no physical exertion have always been favourites with women. But it has been left, one might almost say, to our own generation to see women playing games involving strength and agility of body in the same sense in which men play them, as real trials of skill and endurance, quickeners of the blood, purgers of the body, with seriousness and absorption as ends in themselves. No longer do we tolerate the merely ladylike player who is afraid to perspire or get blisters on her hands; even at croquet she must be strenuous and attentive: pretty incompetence may still attract a certain kind of man in the drawing room, but it is shunned on the field and on the lawn. In this development Englishwomen have, beyond all doubt, played the leading part, and in England, the home of field sports, it is right that this should be so. Women of other nations are now following their lead, which is all the better for them. We need not regret overmuch that a girl from France should bear away a tennis championship, since there is no sign of decadence among our own women, and it is well for English people to be taught that they cannot have things eternally all their own way. English speaking women still lead the world in sport and games, and it is likely that they will continue to do so. Athletic prowess is in itself a sign of independence, a virtue in which the English woman has by far the longest tradition. All the same, she has made such strides in this tradition lately that there seems little room for her to go any further, since there are inevitable limits to her muscular development. She has finally banished the fetish of being “ladylike,” at all events, while she is playing games. She takes off her coat with a vengeance and lets her limbs have full play. I shudder to think what Mrs Grundy of even fifty years ago would have said to a photograph of a lady champion delivering a smashing volley, with one leg kicked up in the air and her knee-high skirt flying in the wind. And the admirable Miss Pinkerton—I cannot conceive her horror on beholding two teams of schoolgirls, in jerseys, perfunctory skirts, most obvious knickers and shin-guards, facing one another for a hockey match. Hunting she might have allowed—did not Sophia Western