But as society continued to evolve, reaching an ever-higher degree of interdependent complexity, developing in the human soul an ever-growing capacity and necessity for wide, free, general association, and transmitting that increasing social capacity to the daughter as well as the son, the enormous pressure had to find some outlet. "What will happen if an irresistible force meets an immovable body?" is the old question, and the answer is "The irresistible force will be resisted and the immovable body be moved." That is exactly what has happened. The irresistible force of the public spirit has met the immovable body of the private house--and that great, splendid, working social force has been frittered away in innumerable little processes of private amusement; the quiet, beautiful, private home has been bloated and coarsened in immeasurable distention as a place of public entertainment. There is more than one line of tendency, good and bad, at work to bring about this peculiar phenomenon of domestic entertainment; but the major condition, without which it could not exist, is the home-bound woman; and the further essential, without which it could not develop to the degree found in what we call "society," is that the home-bound woman be exempt from the domestic industries, exempt from the direct cares of motherhood, exempt from any faintest hint of the great human responsibility of mutual labour; exempt from any legitimate connection with the real social body; and so, still inheriting the enormously increasing pressure of the social spirit, she pours out her energies in this simulacrum of social life we still call "social." What is the effect, or rather what are some of the effects, of this artificial game of living upon the real course of life? And in particular how does it affect the home, and how does the home affect it? In the first place this form of human association, based upon the activities of otherwise idle women, and requiring the home as its vehicle of expression, tends to postpone marriage. The idle woman, contributing nothing to the household labours or expenses, requires to be wholly supported by her husband. This would be a check on marriage even if she stayed at home twirling her thumbs; for he would have to provide women to wait on her, on him, on the children, in default of her service as "house-wife." He could not marry as soon as the man whose wife, strong and skilled in house-service, held up her end of the business, as does the farmer's and mechanic's wife to-day.