And now this unpleasant chapter is ended. Even if it has done no more than annoy, it has perhaps attained its object, which was to point out the vast room still left for women in the strengthening and purifying of our country’s art. The influence of women, when they choose to exercise it, is so irresistible and so salutary that they cannot really be injured by an honest complaint of its failure hitherto to act sufficiently upon national taste and of its tendency, where it is exercised, to be hampering rather than helpful. The chosen spirits among Englishwomen who, by general acknowledgment, are pursuing high ideals with success in the various arts must feel that an injustice is being done to them by their more numerous sisters. Like ardent mountain climbers, pressing on towards a far glistening peak, they must be irritated that the bulk of the party choose to sit down in Teutonic fashion in some comfortable châlet a few hundred feet up to imbibe in perfect contentment small beer and smaller lemonade. Nor are men indifferent. Not at their behest do women lag behind. It is not their wish that women should be feeble critics possessed of uncertain standards or of no standards at all, easily misled by tinsel and facile tears, hypnotised by charlatans, enticed by plausible pedlars of the cheap and showy, charmed by smooth phrases but repelled by fine ideas, partial in their views, lazy in their judgments; for men, in their rambles after the true and the beautiful, often have reason to regret the rarity of feminine companionship to sympathise and share in these loftier activities of the mind. Why should man any longer deplore his masculine solitude? There is nothing now to hinder women from hastening to his side: their knees are no longer hampered by the trailing skirts of prejudice and tradition, they have only to put on intellectual breeches and strike upwards with a will. If they fail there will be no excuse for them: the reproach of being weaker vessels, not by nature’s decree nor men’s foolishness, but of their own deliberate choice, will not be easily avoided. The good Englishwoman has unlimited will and energy: she may yet, if she wishes, lead the women of the world as well in artistic cultivation as in practical activity. CHAPTER IX THE ENGLISHWOMAN IN SOCIETY