MARY ADAMS STEARNS Love, eugenics, marriage, are not three questions, but merely different aspects of the one great sex problem, which, according to Mrs. Havelock Ellis, must be solved within the hearts and souls of men and women and not by the acts of any legislative body. Those who braved the wind and the rain to hear this well known writer and thinker talk about “Sex and Eugenics” were filled with sharp expectancy as she stepped forward to speak—a short woman about fifty years old, with iron gray hair cut close to her head, piercing blue eyes, eloquent hands and a low voice, wonderfully modulated and seemingly as tireless as her poised, vigorous body; yet expectation seldom fulfills the bright dreams it dangles before our eyes. We let ourselves be carried away with enthusiasm, and then are hurt because our visions lack fulfillment. Some expected too much. Chicago has welcomed Mrs. Ellis warmly, yet within this cordiality there have been hidden germs of fear, unreasonable hopes, slavish admiration, mental indifference and misunderstanding—it is always so. She is without question in the foremost ranks of women thinkers, and behind her, trying more or less sincerely to gain an understanding of the great truths that she teaches and upholds, are hordes of women—curious, broad-minded, bigoted, desperate, frightened, sane thinkers, and sentimentalists; women who are economic slaves and others who are financially independent. What does Mrs. Ellis mean to each one of them? What message, if any, has she brought? Has she added anything vital and new to our store of sex and eugenic knowledge which is already burdened with much mediocre and even valueless information? Nothing but death could have kept me away from her lecture in Orchestra Hall February 4th—to which after considerable unnecessary hesitation men were admitted. Although I knew that I was approaching a burning bush I felt it was doomed to be hidden in a cloud of misapprehension, disappointment, and disapproval, and I walked gingerly with my mind open and unprejudiced and alert. I was fully as eager to catch the atmosphere of the audience, to fathom the thoughts of the thousand odd brains that listened, as I was to see and hear Mrs. Ellis herself. The lecture was an event. The dignity, the lack of sensationalism, the quiet earnestness of what was said revealed a force at work in the world as steady and inevitable as the glacier’s erosion of the Swiss hills. Yet this quality of Mrs. Ellis’s mind is shown in all she writes and is shared by all who read her pages. _Her great gift to Chicago was her personality._ It gleamed through every word she spoke and blazed into a pure white flame, that seemed by its very intensity to create a new heaven and a new earth where love shall rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of souls and bodies consumed by a misunderstood and misused passion.