One’s sense of the general or the particular fitness of things is disturbed when an attempt is made to paraphrase or condense the spoken words of Mrs. Ellis. It is seldom that this sense of fitness is at all troubled, because it is a simple matter to extract from the average lecture enough coherent material for second-hand purposes. On the subject given above Mrs. Ellis compels continuous attention. It is not enough to say that she steadily advances her ideas by means of careful phrases, for every phrase seems to be an idea in itself. She is an artist. Her words are like so many focussed lights, not one of which is superfluous. And the illumination which she obtains is a grateful brightness. In listening to her one’s powers of receptivity, while never strained, are not for one moment allowed to rest. As she says, “It’s all solid meat.” Hence, the feeling of futility in an attempt to present justly her observations and schemes of social betterment. What an absurdity might be suggested to the reader by the statement that Mrs. Ellis advocates a form of “trial marriage” or a “probation for engaged lovers”! And yet her plan of such a pre-ceremonial arrangement is as practical as it is badly needed—practical and entirely reasonable, in that she has apparently overlooked nothing, from the subtleties of human nature to the future laws of the land. And how faddish might she appear if one told of her attacks upon latter-day Puritanism, lust in the guise of love, prostitution within marriage, the evils of both repression and brutish or premature expression, the abomination of smirking elders and cowardly guardians, and so forth. Truly, these things constitute a fad of today, but—Mrs. Havelock Ellis was writing and preaching these ideas longer than twenty-five years ago. In questions of love, marriage, and the possible beauty of human relations, she is a splendid, unhurrying pioneer. It would be impossible to measure the courage, the fine perseverance, it has taken to work on patiently and forcefully in the midst of leering society, infallible misunderstanding, and a great ocean of evil-mindedness. What daring! to speak plainly of the beauty of love-passion. And how hopeless! Here, evolution endlessly proves itself a laggard process. Until one hears Mrs. Ellis it is easy to overestimate the “building” powers of Emma Goldman, although it is always too easy to consider only Miss Goldman’s sturdy “wrecking” capacity. But the percentage of constructive element in Mrs. Ellis’s work is much more apparent than in Miss Goldman’s. Clearly, each woman is superlative in her own sphere. By virtue of its tested strength, Mrs. Ellis’s constructive machinery may be said to destroy naturally whatever gets in its way. And in addition to this she does some direct, incisive battling as well. Her humor has carbolic in it. Her sarcasm is a spiritual antiseptic.