Nevertheless, even if the more violent contests and deliberate killing are to be deprecated as recreations for women, there are plenty of games and sports left which they can and do adorn—golf, tennis, squash racquets, croquet, lacrosse, skating, skiing, tobogganing, badminton, and the rest. At all of these they can, if they begin young enough, hold their own with men. Few women keep sufficient suppleness to attain a very high degree of graceful accomplishment in any game which they take up in maturer years, as the painful and awkward swing of many lady golfers bears witness, but nothing is more beautiful than the action of an agile girl driving at golf or serving overhand at lawn tennis. It would be an inestimable advantage to the nation if more of our girls had the time and opportunity to cultivate athletics in their youth, for we should then see less of those anæmic frequenters of cinemas among our girl-workers. But the lesson is being learnt; physical exercises are now practised in every school, and large employers of labour are coming to recognise the wisdom of providing healthy recreation in the open air for female as well as male employees: so that the time may come perhaps when every Englishwoman will have an upright carriage and when the shambling shuffle which too often appears in city streets has given place to a free, easy gait. In youth, certainly, nothing purges the humours like exercise in recreation, and it is wonderful to think of the good sense and sanity which the young ladies of Miss Austen’s day were able to maintain on walking of a very gentle kind. Emma Woodhouse was a charming person, but she must occasionally have felt the desire to hit something very hard, though there is no record of her hitting anything but the _amour propre_ of poor Miss Bates; and Jane Eyre would have toned her nerves better for a few games of tennis. But, when the days of high spirits and superfluous energy are over, women seem better able to settle down than men, who are rather like children in their dependence on amusement. Women, on the whole, may be thankful that they escape the tyranny of habitual exercise in later years and can compose themselves to a reasonable, healthy life without the need for continually perspiring and violently exercising their muscles. Many a wife, I often think, must look with indulgent wonder on her middle-aged husband who, if he is to keep cheerful and contented, must pass at least half the hours when he is not working in playing at something or other. What she can attain with a mild walk, a little gardening, and a bout of stitching he can only compass after propelling for hours a ball about a field or up against a wall or across a table; or else he must be watching somebody else do these things and becoming ludicrously excited in large crowds at cup-ties and test matches, the importance of which to humanity at large is, to say the least, problematical.