It was true enough. There was no subject on which Mrs. Alfred Whittaker was not able to demonstrate an exceedingly pronounced and autocratic opinion. She seldom wasted her time, even after her marriage, in reading what she called trash, and other people spoke of as a "circulating library." Deep thoughts filled her mind, great questions entranced her interest, and high views dominated her life. She was keen on politics of the most Radical order. She had sifted religion, and found it wanting. She was an advanced Socialist--in her views, that is to say--and deep down in her heart, although as yet it had never found expression, was an innate admiration of men and an equal contempt for women. She felt, and often she said, that she had a man's mind in an extremely feminine body. "I cannot," she declared one day, when discussing a great social question with a clever friend of Alfred's, "shut my eyes to the fact that I do not look on a question of this kind as an ordinary woman would. An ordinary woman jumps to conclusions without knowing why or wherefore. I, on the contrary, have a clear and logical mind, which gets me perhaps to the same goal by a clear and definite process of reasoning. We may come from the same, and we may arrive at the same, and yet we are so different that neither has any sympathy with the other." And out of this conversation there arose in Regina Whittaker's mind an idea that, after all, another decade had gone by, and she was still wasting her life. "I asked myself a question at twenty," her thoughts ran. "I asked it again at thirty, and now I have touched my fortieth birthday, here I am asking it yet once more. I have fulfilled the functions of wife and mother, and nothing else. Yet I am an extraordinary woman, far out of the common in intelligence, brain power, logic, and in all mental attributes. It only shows me that the time is not yet ripe for woman to become the equal of man. It is not the fault of the woman. Through many generations--nay, hundreds of years--she has been kept ignorant, inefficient, downtrodden by her lord and master. She has been used as a toy, and her one mission in life has been a mere function of nature--the reproduction of the race. It makes me savage," she went on, talking to herself, "when I hear it cited as an immense work that a woman has produced so many babies. How many, I wonder, have produced those babies with any love of duty, poor feeble souls? After all, there is so little duty about it, and no choice midway. Well, here am I, who should be in a big position in the world, I who should have made myself a name, I who could have put George Eliot and all her set in the shade. I have absolutely wasted my life. I suppose I began too late. I am out of the common, but I do not rank as a woman out of the common. Still, I have daughters. From this moment I dedicate my life to my little Maud and Julia. They shall not begin their mission in the world too late. I would