It is not that men and women generally are hunting for new positions in the snobbish and vulgar sense of the phrase, though efforts of this kind are inevitably obvious after the recent displacement of wealth: it is that the restoration of the world’s gravity is hustling us all in spite of ourselves, making us all more hard and less accommodating. Spring cleaning has only just begun, and it is a process in which our most irreproachable English women will not lay undue stress on ceremony and well-bred ease. The great thing is to sweep up the rubbish, banish the dust and get things clean, and if we look to the women to play the true housewives in this matter, we must excuse a certain _brusquerie_ in the handling of the broom. The dwelling when restored may not be quite the one to which we were accustomed: there may be a hygienic bareness where we remember a cosy stuffiness, a brisker march in ministration to replace slow-moving but charming affability, and a not too gracious economy to succeed some harmlessly extravagant amenities. We shall not complain if our women, needing broader horizons than the drawing room fireplace, fix their eyes upon the things which matter, and grasp them with a finer sense of proportion than did their mothers. In common sense, in sympathy, in personal charm they will never surpass the best of older generations, but wider opportunity and greater freedom must give them new and fine qualities for which a Diana Warwick sighed and which a Christina Pontifex would have abhorred.