the absence of which from the mind of the average Englishwoman allows her to be more spontaneous, if also more frivolous. In the future of feminism, they will get over their frivolity quicker than their French sisters with their excessive caution, and, without the showy exuberance of the American sister, will give the most solid contribution to the welfare of the human race. In marriage, which also purges frivolity, the Englishwoman has already shown the measure of her strength and of her wisdom. If, prone to material waste and putting sentiment before utility, she has yet to become an adept in the theory of social economy, her practical instinct, aided by her admirable economy of emotion, make her by temperament and by experience a woman of action, a staunch comrade and an agreeable companion. She is fitted to teach as much, at least, as she will ever have to learn, nor has she anything to fear from any comparison made over the whole ground of womanly activities, capabilities and graces. CHAPTER V THE ENGLISH MOTHER When a woman has begun to speak and think in terms of “your father” as well as of “my husband,” she has not merely extended the sphere of her interpretership, but has assumed a new personality in addition to any that she may have had before, the personality of the mother. The extension of the interpretership, which is one of the responsibilities of the added personality, is in itself not unimportant. In the outer world the wife-interpreter has not to create an entire character, but to give a greater reality to an already well apprehended external appearance, and that only in the direction of increasing its amenity. The mother has to create the father for the children progressively, timing the stages of the structure to the expansion of their intelligence, and she has to awake in them not only a sense of his beauty, goodness and power, but of his displeasure, his wisdom even in denial, and the sanctity of his preoccupations. This task is not too easy, however lightly and inevitably it is undertaken. The beneficent deity, so soon to dwindle in stature to that of an ordinary man, is not hidden, as it is wise for deities to be, so that if the artistic imagination be stretched too far in his creation, the discrepancies between the living person and the created being become sufficiently glaring to strike even a childish apprehension. The woman who creates the father with tact, giving the impression of removing rather than giving false impressions, is a valuable wife and an excellent mother. It is difficult for a man to reveal himself to a child, unless he has a peculiarly expansive disposition, and, with the best will in the world to stand before his offspring on his own legs, he is bound to depend to some extent—though some men are far more lazy than others—upon wifely interpretation. But the interpreter must be wary lest she is caught by keen little eyes in the act of booming out oracles from behind a